Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
Would you move a species threatened by climate change to an area where it isn’t currently found but where the new climate suits it better? That’s “assisted migration,” and the lively debate around it is described by Carl Zimmer in the New York Times here. He quotes a thorough review of the ecological and evolutionary …
Frank Rijsberman aims to build a “strong Consortium.” Teaching tools aim to improve capacity in plant breeding. And no, I didn’t mean anything by the juxtaposition, settle down. Kenyan reality show aims to enhance rural livelihoods. What, are you trying to be funny? No, I tell you, it’s all a massive coincidence. You know what, …
Don’t you just hate it when a striking message from an elegant model is complicated by, well, facts? I may have Nibbled a press release on a recent modeling study from Wageningen University. The crux of the results was that as species migrate north due to climate change, they shed diversity from the central, most …
Continue reading “Pitfalls in modeling the effects of climate change on genetic diversity”
Is genetic pollution necessarily a bad thing? Well of course there’s pollution and pollution, and the term is often used to describe what might happen to a crop or its wild relatives when a GM variety of that crop starts to be grown in their proximity. But here I mean the genetic mixing of two …
Something just in from our occasional contributor Jacob van Etten. Climate change will shift the limits of the suitable areas of many wild animals and plants, including crop wild relatives. Some species may adapt by gradually moving into areas which resemble their current home area. In other cases, no bridges exist to connect old and …
Continue reading “Getting to grips with ecological interactions”