Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
Robert E. Rhoades is dead. He was a pioneer of agricultural anthropology and wrote extensively on conservation of agrobiodiversity, especially how local people do it. His 1991 National Geographic piece The World’s Food Supply at Risk is a classic.
I’ve just learned that the article is no longer behind a paywall. It is here, in full. Yay! Science. There’s a fascinating paper in last week’s Science Express ((Godfray, H., Beddington, J., Crute, I., Haddad, L., Lawrence, D., Muir, J., Pretty, J., Robinson, S., Thomas, S., & Toulmin, C. (2010). Food Security: The Challenge of …
There’s a strange story one hears in various quarters, that small-scale farmers, outside the industrial mainstream, don’t really know how to save their own seeds. We saw it a couple of weeks ago in a comment from Andre, who said that European legislation ensures that “varieties [are] properly maintained and registered and the seed produced …
Another attempt to harness the “wisdom of crowds” is in the offing. The eBiosphere informatics challenge is asking people around the world to send in observations of “species of interest.” That basically means mainly invasives and threatened species, for now. You can contribute photographs to Flickr or use Twitter or send an email. You don’t …
Continue reading ““Global human sensor net” to be cast for biodiversity”
When we talk about biodiversity — including agrobiodiversity — we really mean three things at the same time: diversity among ecosystems, among species, and within species. Scientists usually study these scales separately, but can diversity at one level somehow affect diversity at another? That’s the question tackled by an experiment described last week in Science …