Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
Thanks to Dirk Enneking for this great tip:
One of my favourite museums and, apparently one of its kind, has just re-opened in Adelaide, South Australia, the Museum of Economic Botany, a former promotion facility for underutilised crops.
Looks great. If anyone goes, let us know about it. Thanks, Dirk.
The bumblebee Bombus subterraneus is extinct in the UK — it was last seen in 1988 at Dungeness nature reserve on the south Kent coast — but has been thriving in New Zealand.
The short-haired bumblebee was exported from the UK to New Zealand on the first refrigerated lamb boats in the late 19th Century to pollinate clover crops.
It has disappeared in Britain (though it apparently is still to be found on the continent) because of “[l]oss of extensive, herb-rich grasslands, especially those containing good stands of plants of the families Lamiaceae and Fabaceae, through agricultural intensification.” But now there’s a plan to set up a captive breeding programme using the expats, with a view to reintroduction, including in restored habitats.
I could not find any information on whether the decline of the short-haired bumblebee affected the pollination of any plant species, or whether the slack has been taken up by other bumblebees. But be that as it may, this is an interesting example of assisted migration, of a sort, though I don’t think climate change has been implicated in the fate of the insect in Britain. It’s also an example of going back to former colonies to look for genetic resources that are no longer to be found in the “mother” country. Like those Hopi peaches of a few days back. Uhm, I feel another post coming on…
Another attempt to harness the “wisdom of crowds” is in the offing. The eBiosphere informatics challenge is asking people around the world to send in observations of “species of interest.” That basically means mainly invasives and threatened species, for now. You can contribute photographs to Flickr or use Twitter or send an email. You don’t have to be a taxonomist: you’re asked to do your best on the identification, and they’ll bring experts in for confirmation. All the observations coming in will be integrated it with other scientific knowledge (e.g. taxonomy, maps, conservation status) on the species.
Now, if you’re a regular reader you’ll know this kind of approach is one we’ve occasionally contemplated here for crop wild relatives, landraces and other agrobiodiversity, in particular to monitor threats and erosion. So I’ll be watching closely.
It was over two years ago that we blogged about attempts to bring back Iraq’s southern marshes, and the agriculture they supported. Now, via Wired, there’s evidence from NASA of at least partial success.
A United Nations Environment Program assessment of the Iraq marsh restoration in 2006 concluded that roughly 58 percent of the marsh area present in the mid-1970s had been restored in the sense that standing water was seasonally present and vegetation was reasonably dense.
Here’s what this (partial) reclaiming of the marshes looks like from space:
But serious concerns remain: the water used for reflooding may not be sustainable as the population recovers and expands its agricultural efforts, and the region may have already suffered an irreversible loss of species diversity.
Would be nice to know to what extent traditional agriculture is also coming back. Maybe this could be discerned from the aerial images? What has happened to local landraces in the meantime?
There’s also rice, for one thing. Check out the recent BBC video on the Eden Project: rice makes an appearance at about the 2:30 mark. A quick search of the website does suggest that agrobiodiversity is well represented in the Biomes. And you can definitely buy crop seeds in the shop. But I couldn’t find any references to crop wild relatives on the website, which seems a pity. Or have I missed something? Eden would seem to be a great opportunity for education and public awareness on CWRs.