Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

December 5, 2006December 5, 2006

Legume to remove nitrogen

I’m still trying to get my head round this one. USDA scientists are developing a soybean variety (which they stress is not genetically modified) bred to remove nitrogen from the land.

The variety does not develop nodules, the little bumps on the root that house nitrogen-fixing bacteria. Now those nitrogen-fixing bacteria are one of the best reasons to plant legumes, because they boost soil fertility. Why would you want a legume that did not? So that animal producers could use it to solve their waste problem. I expect it makes sense in the hyper-specialized world that the USDA serves but, as I said, I’m having a little trouble with the idea.

Photo of soybean field courtesy of USDA.

December 5, 2006December 5, 2006

A consumer view of a neglected species

We normally blog production aspects here; for a change, go read the food diary of someone who decided to try and eat as much hemp — for the omega 3 oils — as she could. Committed consumers are clearly useful, as is good marketing. But the final conclusion seems to be that timing is everything.

December 5, 2006

Oil palms and diversity

It is an article of faith that intensive monocultures of genetically uniform plants are bad for biodiversity, wild and agricultural. So news that Malaysia is putting some money into a “Palm Oil Wildlife Conservation Fund to promote ideas and proposals to enhance biodiversity linked to palm oil production worldwide” is welcome. The fund will seek to promote sustainable practices and to make more use of the production of palm oil plantations, in addition to boosting biodiversity in and around plantations. There’s also talk of using palm oil to produce biofuels, a hot topic at the CGIAR Annual General Meeting.

December 5, 2006

Information for foresters

IAALD offers a very useful filleting of papersÂ from two conferences on forestry information, accessing it and managing it.

December 5, 2006December 6, 2006

Google Earth

I’ll be posting later this week about the importance of geo-tagging biodiversity, but for now I just wanted to point out that Google Earth Blog, an independent forum for the discussion of the things you can do with Google Earth, has a section on the environment. Many of the things Frank Taylor posts on under this tag will be relevant to the study and conservation of biodiversity. And here’s a great Google Earth application I’ve recently come across, though from another source.Â The Malaria Atlas Project is pulling together data on the global distribution of the malaria parasites as a prelude to modelling their spatial limits.