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Collecting to restore

We blogged recently about the huge fire in Arizona and what it may be doing to crop wild relatives. In southern California, however, they’re doing something more than just wringing their hands with worry. They’re going out and collecting seeds, that could later be used for restoration, as part of a project called Seeds of Success.

Once back at Rancho Santa Ana, the team dries the seeds in their paper bags, boxes them up and sends them to the national Bend Seed Extractory in Bend, Ore. There they are sorted and X-rayed to see whether they are viable, and then scientists go to work trying to find out how to get them to germinate.
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Part of each seed lot is stored at the U.S. National Seed Bank as an insurance policy against future threats such as climate change, and some go to native plant researchers with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The trove also is shared with the Kew Millennium Seed Bank operated by the Royal Botanic Garden in England, which aims to save 25 percent of the world’s plant species by 2020.

In some mountain areas, they’ll really have to hurry.

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Mujib Nature Reserve has interesting plants too

So the Mujib Nature Reserve, “Jordan’s jewel of eco-tourism,” is poised to be promoted to UNESCO Biosphere Reserve. There have been ethnopharmacological studies of the flora of the site, which has even been used to “test models to improve the conservation of medicinal and herbal plants and the livelihood of rural communities through the management, and sustainable use of medicinal and herbal (M/H) plants for human and livestock needs.” And the flora baseline survey for the reserve is listed in Jordan’s monitoring system for implementation of the Global Plan of Action on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture as being part of the country’s efforts to “promote in situ conservation of crop wild relatives.” Wonderful. But I got all that by googling. Why is not more made of the plants on the page devoted to the reserve on the website of Jordan’s Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature, along with the Long-legged Buzzard and the Eurasian Badger? And yes, that’s a rhetorical question.

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The diversity of Andean diversity festivals

Hot on the heels of the Fifth Potato Festival in Peru, which we mentioned a few days ago, comes the Festival Nacional de la Agrobiodiversidad Frutos de la Tierra, also in Peru, 24-26 June. And, not to be outdone, Ecuador weighs in with the I Seminario Internacional de la Papa, also on 24 June. One has to wonder what is driving this proliferation of agricultural events in the region. And since we’re on the subject of Andean diversity, does anyone else think that some of the potato varieties illustrated by National Geographic are nothing of the sort?

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How to buy on-farm conservation

An item on the website of Conservation Magazine describes how best to buy ecosystem services. It distinguishes “payments for action” from “payments for results”.

Farmers in Europe, it says, are paid to mow their hayfields to create habitat for birds, and get the cash regardless of how many birds use the grasslands. That’s payment for action.

In Cambodia, by contrast, villagers are paid to conserve forests, “but only if visiting birdwatchers see certain unusual species”. Payment for results.

Most current schemes to pay for ecosystem services apparently reward actions, rather than results. But which method actually delivers better results?

In general, “payment by action is favored where there is a clear action” that will clearly benefit biodiversity and is relatively easy to measure, they concluded. So paying to increase wetland habitat for birds known to frequent marshes would make sense.

In contrast, in degraded landscapes, or in places where conservationists aren’t sure which actions will bring the most benefit, it might make more sense to pay for results.

The conclusions emerge not from any kind of field study but from a theoretical model “consisting of one conservation agency, one land manager and one patch of habitat. The model assumed that the land manager wanted to maximize income from the patch. The agency, meanwhile, had a limited budget and wanted to get the biggest biodiversity boost for its buck.”

How to apply this to on-farm conservation of agricultural biodiversity? It’s complex. Research is currently going on at Bioversity and elsewhere, with some nifty approaches that, for example, allow different communities to bid for the payments, establishing a market that economist Adam Drucker says allows you to get more conservation for the same amount of money. He has also been exploring the tensions between economic efficiency and social equity; do members of the community resent some being paid more than others for the “same” conservation. A peer-reviewed journal has accepted a paper for publication; we’ll bring you news of an “easier” version of the story when we have it.