Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

March 4, 2010March 5, 2010

Featured: Conservation

Brian Ford-Lloyd is moved swiftly to action by Slow Food:

Hold on! Whoever thought those involved in food production could undertake effective conservation of genetic diversity? Slow food enthusiasts are not the only ones to discard the ‘not-so-good’ – the whole of domestication must have been based on it. Hunter gatherers rejected the more spiny/hairy/thick seed coated/bitter tasting/alkoloid containing in favour of those plants with less of those no-so-good features. Plant breeders have traditionally done the same, but who said plant breeders made the best conservationists?

Leaving aside the alkaloids, obviously, one would have to agree. Agriculture grows by selection, and selection requires rejection. But where does Slow Food fit into all this?

March 4, 2010March 4, 2010

Berry Go Round

The latest edition of Berry go Round, the blog carnival for all things botanical, is up at Foothills Fancy. Of course, not everything botanical is agricultural, but enough is for me to point you to:

An investigation of pies, from the standpoint of their fillings.
An investigation of old-time fern books, though it doesn’t say that some are good to eat, in small doses. Probably because she’s already done that.
An investigation of witches’ brooms, though not the ones that afflict Theobroma cacao.

March 4, 2010March 4, 2010

Looking for information about Erna Bennett

Our friend Danny has a new blog at agrobiodiversitie, the final two letters of which are a reference to his native Ireland. He’s trying to find out more about Erna Bennett, one of the great pioneers of genetic conservation. Indeed, she coined that phrase, which I didn’t know. Anyway, take a look at Danny’s site and if you can help, leave a comment there. Here’s our contribution.

March 4, 2010March 3, 2010

The ins and outs of accessing bugs

“We didn’t get the permit” to export the wasp, said Fabian Haas, head of the Biosystematics Support Unit at the Kenya-based International Center of Insect Physiology and Ecology.

He was trying to bring the wasps from Sri Lanka to Kenya to fight the fruit flies which made the same journey accidentally in 2003 and are now ravaging mangoes in Africa. Seems unfair. Maybe the CBD’s meeting in Japan in October will sort it all out. Or maybe not.

March 3, 2010

Kew maps botanical diversity

There’s news from Kew that its GIS Unit has an interactive map out looking at the geographic distribution of plant diversity at the genus and family level. Here’s how they did it:

For each genus of flowering plants, distributions were compiled principally from the specimens held in Kew’s Herbarium. In addition, standard reference floras and checklists for each region of the world (as far as possible) were consulted for doubtful distribution records (such as only one or a few specimens of any genus from a particular region, or doubtfully identified specimens). Many hundreds of individual articles were also consulted, and whether or not a genus was native, doubtfully native, doubtfully present or introduced was noted. Only presence has been recorded; regions from which a genus is absent are not listed, and there is no record of abundance, extent of distribution within regions, or numbers of species either of genera or within regions.

It’s nice enough and all, but I don’t really understand it. I mean, why use those funny regions? Why not proper ecoregions? What’s wrong with just using countries? Anyway, it would be interesting to know if something similar is being planned for the plants conserved in the Millennium Seed Bank, which was coincidentally in the news again this week. Or, indeed, with the material conserved by the international genebanks of the CGIAR system, data on which is to be found in the SINGER database.