Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
Glenn is ready to take up our challenge on crop distribution mapping:
I suppose that you could use “big data” & machine learning to find individual crop patterns in all that data. I think that some people are doing this kind of thing, but it’s private sector stuff. The global crop maps rely too heavily on data from surveys and censuses, and all the problems that come with those in terms of standardizing across countries.
Kinda. Sorta.
Susan Bragdon sounds frustrated:
It seems like the studies at least both confirm the dynamism in managing and developing landraces. One would expect some to go out of use and new landraces to emerge (good reason, amongst others, to have ex situ collections to have “snap shots” over time). I know I am saying nothing new to this audience, but in international circles — even some parts of the international world specifically addressing biological diversity (I can tell you about the Human Rights Council Resolution on Biological Diversity adopted in March as an example) — the idea that farmers are more than preserving a static pool of genetic resources is not well-understood. And don’t get me going on understanding the links to health, employment, peace…
What brought this on now, Susan? And if you want a platform for discussing those links, we do take guest posts.
I ran across a bunch of nice crop maps on the internet ((Though there are some strange things about a couple of them. Check out the shea one, for example.)), so I made a GIF for you (click on it to get it cycling).
You’re welcome.
I’m reliably informed the source is Monfreda et al. (2008). You can download the data in multiple formats, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen the headline maps displayed all together as The Decolonial Atlas has done, albeit without attribution, which is naughty.
Anyway, people have obviously taken the trouble to download and play around with the data. For example, they have been ably mashed up by Bioversity to get a global crop diversity map.
Which, in turn, it is instructive to compare with the one from the Lancet Planetary Health map we blogged about a few days ago.
But which dataset to use to do this kind of stuff? Monfreda’s is only one of many.
I see that we now, after a long wait, have WordClim 2, thanks to the work of our friend Robert Hijmans and his colleagues. ((Not to mention climate surfaces going back 20,000 years.)) Is it too much to hope for that he’ll now turn his hand to producing the definitive crop distribution dataset? ((Yes, we’ve blogged about this before. More than once.)) Maybe something for the CGIAR’s Big Data Platform, just launched, to think about organizing, convening, and/or inspiring.
Remember a short blog post from seven years back saying how Ethiopia had just protected some wild coffee forests?
We Nibbled yesterday a UN press release saying that a Biosphere Reserve had been created in Ethiopia to protect wild coffee. But actually it turns out that it is no less than TWO reserves that have just been selected by UNESCO, Kafa and Yayu. Many thanks to Tadesse Woldemariam Gole for the tip.
No, I didn’t think so. But anyway, here’s the latest on that, courtesy of the coffee team at Kew.
In April 2015 we started the three year project ‘Mainstreaming biodiversity conservation and climate resilience at Yayu Biosphere Reserve (Ethiopia)’. In this project, poverty alleviation, biodiversity, and climate resilience, are inextricably linked.
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The project has now been running for almost two years, and despite a few surprises, is achieving considerable success. Catch-up on our progress in the second part of this post, available in the coming months.
Previous experience in this sort of thing has been mixed, so I’m looking forward to hearing more. In the coming months.
From the CIAT blog:
Putting true numbers on diversity loss turns out to be a complicated and contested business, with no shortage of strong opinions. One big part of the problem is that there aren’t many good ways to count the diversity that existed before it disappeared. Researchers have done some work to assess the changes in diversity in crop varieties of Green Revolution cereals, and to some degree on the genetic diversity within those varieties. The results indicate that, although diversity on farms decreased when farmers first replaced traditional varieties with modern types, the more recent trends are not so simple to decipher.
My work here is done.