Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
“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.
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.
Turkey is the latest entrant in the Ours is Bigger Than Yours Genebank Stakes. It has “the latest technology in the world” and is the “world’s third largest plant gene bank“. So that’s alright then. Exactly why Turkey needs this facility and what will be in it are not clear from the reports I’ve read.
We had a nice response to a recent post about UG99 from someone called Paul.
With reference to UG99 wheat mould – would anyone consider using far-out & whacky ideas to overcome this problem or are our scientists and universities more interested in getting funding for research from the large companies that make chemical sprays etc?
I suspect that the long-term solution to these resistant strains is not more chemicals or gene alteration (mutation) that can be patented and unable to be used by poor countries. We have too much of that already.
If you know anyone who is doing research into UG99, I would like to contribute my whacky idea that costs nothing!
To which we can only say, if it won’t cost anything, why not just broadcast it — we’ll give you a platform here if you need one — and let people see if they want to give it a try. Alternatively, if any readers are working on UG99 and want to get in touch with Paul, use the Contact Form and we’ll forward your message.
It was Lord Beaverbrook, I think, who said that if something had not been reported in his once-mighty Daily Express, then it hadn’t happened. 1 For netizens of the modern age, much the same could be said of MetaFilter; if it isn’t there, it’s nowhere. And so it came to pass that UG99, recently covered by Wired magazine and Nibbled here, is officially a threat; it says so on MetaFilter.
I’m not actually a member, nor do I care to be. 2 But if I were, I’d be responding to some of those comments, oh yes. And thanks to those comments, I’ve learned that the Wired piece’s author keeps a blog, which contains stuff that had to be left out. Cool.