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.
Featured: The need for seed
Cary agrees on the need for caution in seed provision after disasters, and has some recommendations of his own.
In good times or bad, seed introductions by outside agencies must be done with care. There may be reason for genebanks to be more involved in the future in some cases (supplying materials if actually lost and still desired). Stronger connections between relief/development agencies and genebanks and other professionals (who might be able to GIS and other data to ascertain appropriateness of varietal candidates for introduction) would certainly be a good thing.