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Ecoagriculture reviewed, again

It was over two years ago that we mentioned a meta-meta analysis of ecoagriculture. Since then we’ve had Prof. Olivier de Schutter, the U.N. Special Rapporteur on the right to food, weighing in, among other celebrities. Now David Suzuki, no less, tells us about yet another review, with much the same bottom line:

…our review supports the claim that the solutions to the problems of widespread food insecurity and biodiversity loss need not be mutually exclusive, and that it may be possible to address both using appropriate alternative agricultural practices.

Here I just want to throw something else into the mix. We know from yet another recent meta-analysis that there are recognizable socioeconomic patterns to the distribution of infraspecific crop diversity on farm. A study has just been published which suggests that the number of species cultivated by a traditional society can be predicted by latitude, environmental heterogeneity (mainly altitude), and the commitment of the society to agriculture (as opposed to herding, foraging and exchange). Does this mean there are some intrinsic limits to the level of intra- and inter-specific agrobiodiversity a given agricultural system will support? And if so, what does that mean for ecoagriculture in that region?

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Making the most of bitter gourd diversity at AVRDC

Another interesting agrobiodiversity piece in AVRDC’s newletter today:

The AVRDC Nutrition group is locked in a struggle with a cucurbit – and so far, warty Momordica charantia appears to be winning! As part of the project “A better bitter gourd: exploiting bitter gourd to increase incomes, manage type 2 diabetes, and promote health in developing countries,” researchers have begun preparing samples of the vegetable for later laboratory analysis.

Interested? “Like” the project’s Facebook page then!

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Mapping Australian biodiversity

I finally got around to having a go at the Atlas of Living Australia. Very nice. You can make, and download images of, pretty maps of species distributions, Glycine in this case.

And you can mash that up with lots of different environmental layers, such as protected areas, as below.

There are nifty spatial analysis tools built in, to help you predict species distributions based on climate, for example, or explore the range of adaptation of a taxon. You can contribute to the data through citizen science projects. And much more. Well worth exploring.

What you can’t do — or at least I couldn’t find a way of doing it — is export the species distribution data to a kmz for use in Google Earth. Something I’ve complained about before for other biodiversity portals. Maybe someone out there will tell us why that is. 1

One final thing. It’s a great idea to feature a number of “themes” on the atlas website, to get people started. At the moment it is things like wattles, “iconic species” and ants. Why not crop wild relatives?

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Featured: Seed distribution

Paul has some doubts about the whole bag-of-seeds-on-a-Coke-can thing:

On the point of distributing diverse seed — surely one of the principles of seed diversity conservation is regional difference and capacity for local conservation — centralised distribution would almost limit diversity by definition. I recognise that you talk about how it would educate and encourage seed-saving behaviour, but it would have most relevance where these skills are already lost.

My own doubts centre more about how you manage the information. If there’s a Genebank Database Hell, surely this kind of thing would be its seventh circle? Anyway, Jacob does have a reply:

I think that “centralized distribution” doesn’t necessarily imply an untargeted approach.

Let the discussion continue!