The International Journal of the Commons, a new one on me, has a special issue on microbes. Actually, not just microbes. The idea seems to be to compare and contrast what is happening in microbial genetic resources with the access and benefit sharing and IPR regimes which are in force for other bits of biodiversity. There’s even an interesting paper entitled “Crop improvement in the CGIAR as a global success story of open access and international collaboration,” by Byerlee and Dubin. Elinor Ostrom, winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize for Economics, is a member of the editorial board of the journal.
Twittering rice
The Africa Rice Centre is tweeting (twittering?) away at the African Rice Congress in Bamako, Mali. Oh, there’s a website too, and a blog with an RSS feed, but that seems so terribly 20th century somehow.
Agrobioblitz next?
The British public are being called on to help document their fauna and flora. Nice, and there should be some interesting data on crop wild relatives in there. But I hope this is followed up with a similar blitz on heirloom crop varieties.
Mapping threats to biodiversity
Came across two maps of threats to biodiversity today. There’s a great online interactive map of the status of, threats to, and conservation actions in, the forests in the southern US. And UNEP has a map of threats to gorilla habitats and protected areas in eastern Congo. As I say, that’s just what turned up in my feed reader today. Now, tell me, why isn’t there something like this for… I don’t know… wheat? I mean forests are important to health, sure. But so is wheat.
Paper on climate change and species distributions attains classic status
Conservation.Bytes features a landmark 2004 paper on the projected effect of climate change on species distributions as its latest Conservation Classic. It also points to a 2008 summary of such studies over at BraveNewClimate. Regular readers will know that there have been studies which have focused specifically on the wild genepools of different crops.