Susan Bragdon has a question on that goopy maize agreement:
But what about the possible impacts of this agreement on the conservation and sustainable use of biological diversity?
Indeed.
The nitty gritty of ABS explained
There’s an update on the nitrogen-fixing maize goop story that we blogged about a few months back. It’s from YaleEnvironment360, so you know it’s going to be good.
A Mars subsidiary called BioN2 had signed an agreement with a village to share financial benefits from the maize’s commercialization. That village turned out to be Totontepec, a Mixe indigenous community in the mountains of eastern Oaxaca… The UC Davis/Mars researchers received a certificate of compliance with the Nagoya Protocol, an international agreement aimed at compensating indigenous communities for their biological resources and traditional knowledge.
Sounds good, right? But questions remain.
Still, the situation surrounding Totontepec’s maize raises complex questions about how indigenous communities equitably benefit when research scientists and multinational corporations commercialize local crops and plants. Should Totontepec’s maize turn out to be a miracle, self-fertilizing crop whose genetic traits can be replicated worldwide, will the community’s Mixe people receive a significant long-term share of profits, which could potentially number in the millions of dollars? How does Nagoya ensure that the rights and interests of small indigenous communities are safeguarded when their leaders negotiate complex deals with international lawyers and executives? And, not least, when a valuable plant is found throughout a region, is it fair for a single village such as Totontepec to reap financial benefits from its maize while neighboring communities with identical or similar maize receive nothing?
These questions, and others, are discussed in the article, which is really a model of its kind, courtesy of Martha Pskowski.
Brainfood: Production stability, Mapping crops, Nigerian fish, Seed quality, C&E meta-data, Robots, Multivariate stats, Almond domestication, Fruit chilling, Forages & soils, Groundnut mini-core, PAs & CC, Indonesian diets, NUS, Asian-African animals
- Sensitivity of grain yields to historical climate variability in India. Other cereals are less sensitive than rice.
- Monitoring Changes in the Cultivation of Pigeonpea and Groundnut in Malawi Using Time Series Satellite Imagery for Sustainable Food Systems. Pigeonpea cultivation has expanded so much in response to Asian markets you can track it from space. But for how long?
- The relationship between forests and freshwater fish consumption in rural Nigeria. Fish need forests.
- Temporal patterns of seed quality development, decline, and timing of maximum quality during seed development and maturation. “…when maximum quality is first attained, and for how long it is maintained during seed development and maturation, varies with genotype and environment.” Oh, great.
- Modeling Crop Genetic Resources Phenotyping Information Systems. Managing meta-data on characterization and evaluation data.
- In vivo human-like robotic phenotyping of leaf traits in maize and sorghum in greenhouse. Yes, characterization and evaluation data like this.
- Ten quick tips for effective dimensionality reduction. How to analyze all that C&E data.
- Mutation of a bHLH transcription factor allowed almond domestication. A point mutation is all it took.
- Chilling accumulation in fruit trees in Spain under climate change. Some fruit trees, even in generally warm places, need a certain amount of cold to develop properly, and might not get it in the future. Maybe a point mutation will come to the rescue.
- Smart forage selection could significantly improve soil health in the tropics. Could.
- Evaluation of linkage disequilibrium, population structure, and genetic diversity in the U.S. peanut mini core collection. Can’t really use for GWAS. What a tragedy.
- Implications of climate change to the design of protected areas: The case study of small islands (Azores). The current PA system will still be ok on one island, but not on another. Has someone done this globally?
- Urbanisation, dietary change and traditional food practices in Indonesia: A longitudinal analysis. Westernization of diets is limited to Jakarta.
- Orphan crops: their importance and the urgency of improvement. They seem to be doing ok in Indonesia?
- Reconstructing Asian faunal introductions to eastern Africa from multi-proxy biomolecular and archaeological datasets. Chickens and black rats went from Asia to the coast of E Africa in the mid-first millennium CE.
- Archaeological and biometric perspectives on the development of chicken landraces in the Horn of Africa. Or maybe earlier for chicken after all.
An indicator for the conservation of socioeconomically and culturally valuable plants
The CIAT/CropTrust proposal for the calculation of “Comprehensiveness of conservation of socioeconomically as well as culturally valuable species” is up on the Biodiversity Indicators Partnership website.
Here’s a recent blog post on the indicator, which is relevant for Aichi Target 13 and SDG 2, Target 2.5.
And here’s the underlying paper which described the method in detail: Comprehensiveness of conservation of useful wild plants: An operational indicator for biodiversity and sustainable development targets.
Finally, here’s the website where you can explore the data.
Reforestation: Where, why, and how much?
There’s been a spate of papers on reforestation just lately and I was despairing of being able to keep track of them, let alone read them. But along comes Jonah Busch, Chief Economist at Earth Innovation, to make sense of all the maps in a couple of tweets:
Here are maps of reforestation's potential, feasibility and benefits, and costs pic.twitter.com/fK3jyFPjSr
— Jonah Busch (@jonahbusch) July 5, 2019
Here are the papers:
- Potential: The global tree restoration potential.
- Opportunities: Global restoration opportunities in tropical rainforest landscapes.
- Costs: Potential for low-cost carbon dioxide removal through tropical reforestation.
Thanks, Jonah!
LATER: There’s a nice round-up of two of the studies in Mother Nature Network. Bottom line is in the title: Massive reforestation might be the moonshot we need to slow down climate change. That doesn’t mean forests are a silver bullet, though.
LATER STILL: And, of course, who is also important.
AND FINALLY: Some objections have arisen…