Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
After Pavlovsk and Brogdale, it is now the turn of a French fruit genebank to feel the heat. According to Declan Butler’s somewhat breathless piece in Nature: Uncertainty hangs over one of the world’s largest and most important grapevine collections. The Domaine de Vassal vineyard, on France’s Mediterranean coast, houses a vast sweep of grape …
An important field genebank of rare fruit trees faces an uncertain future as a result of financial support. No, not that one. Bioversity International reports that the Pomona Botanical Conservatory in Apulia, Italy, has failed to obtain a much needed grant to support its activities. And in other threatened genebank news, our friends in the …
It’s clear genebanks around the world are having a hard time. The poster child just at the moment is Pavlovsk, of course. But we’ve heard lately that Australia’s genebanks are also threatened. And we’ve also been following a similar situation over the past several months at Wellesbourne in the UK. Why is this happening? As …
We pointed out recently that the threat to the Pavlovsk Experiment Station’s field genebanks is not, in fact, as unique as it might seem. From Science magazine comes news that “Australia’s seed banks are tumbling like dominoes”. The report details the gradual loss of Australia’s six genebanks. [I]n mid-2008 a bank in Adelaide holding Mediterranean …
Continue reading “Australia and Russian Federation shoulder to shoulder over genebanks”
Over at Vaviblog, Jeremy has a post explaining why Pavlovsk is not unique. Alas, it’s because it’s by no means the only genebank that’s in trouble. Wellesbourne and Brogdale, the UK’s national collections of vegetable and fruit diversity, have both been through the wringer lately. On October 1 Wellesbourne and the Genetic Resources Unit were …