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Yield trial sites mapped

Glenn Hyman has a great map over at AGCommons. It shows the sites in Africa where international crop networks carried out yield trials in the 1960’s, 70’s and 80’s (and some beyond). Here it is:

trialsites2

Would be interesting to compare with the various accessibility maps I posted a couple of days ago, and indeed with agroclimatic maps. No doubt Glen is doing it as we speak, and lots of other stuff too.

Read the interesting comment too: “Africa’s green revolutions will be fundamentally different from Asia’s — because Africa and Asia are fundamentally different, because times have changed, and because we have learnt a few tricks in the meanwhile!!”

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Kenyan butterfly farmers flying high

94446896_acdf2bebfb_m.jpg The Kenya Forest Service is one of the forces behind butterfly farming projects around the country. According to the latest KFS annual report (which I found out about from ASNS), household incomes have really benefited from the project, mostly by exporting butterfly pupae to collectors and butterfly farms abroad, mostly in the United States and the United Kingdom. The report, launched last week, says: 1

The butterfly farming project based at Arabuko-Sokoke forests is one of the various initiatives aimed at involving forest adjacent communities in conservation through sustainable utilization of forest resources to improve livelihoods. The community appreciates the role that the project has played in the improvement of their household income and the positive contribution impacted towards conservation and management of the forest.

We’ve written about butterfly and silk farming in Africa before and it is good to know that these projects do seem to be working. The primary impact is to preserve the forest, by giving local villagers an incentive to keep it intact as a new source of income. Digging around a bit, I found some more useful resources. David Ngala at Wildlife Direct had a post about the Kipepeo project, which links to the project’s own web site. All very worthwhile.

Photo, of Papilio demodocus, by Matt and Kim Rudge, used under a Creative Commons license.

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Crop wild relatives in the spotlight

The International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture will be holding the 3rd session of its Governing Body in Tunis next week. If you’re going, let us have your impressions, please.

And watch out for the side event on “Securing Crop Wild Relative Conservation: Lessons Learned from Global Partnership,” organised by Bioversity International and the Food and Agriculture Organization, which will take place in the Salle Carthage 3 of the Hotel Barcelo Carthage Thalasso on 3 June at 18:00. Soft drinks and snacks will be served, I’m reliably informed by our friend Danny, who will be there making sure that order and decorum is maintained.

The side event will highlight the critical importance of crop wild relatives to global food security and the urgency of taking action to ensure their conservation, especially in the context of climate change. The experiences and outputs of the UNEP/GEF supported project, aimed at enhancing conservation and utilization of crop wild relatives, will be described, including the development of national and global information systems and national in situ conservation strategies.

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Berry genebank the pride of Oregon

There’s a lengthy article in Portland Monthly on the National Clonal Germplasm Repository at Corvallis, a unit within the United States Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service (USDA/ARS). It focuses on a couple of the people working there in particular, for example strawberry expert Kim Hummer:

Inside one of these greenhouses, diffused winter light streams through the glass ceiling, illuminating horticulturalist Kim Hummer and her colleagues as they hover over a small potted strawberry plant that, considering its history-steeped neighbors, appears undeserving of so much attention. Devoid of fruit, the plant’s heart-shaped leaves are edged brown, its runner pale red. It doesn’t look much different than any one of the other hundreds of strawberry plants crowding dozens of long tables. Yet Hummer’s voice brims with excitement. “This is a wild decaploid,” she says. “It’s very special.”

Want to know the species, which comes from the side of a volcano on Russia’s Iturup Island? Read the whole thing. There’s a lot, lot more.

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Why biodiversity matters

Shahid Naeem’s 2 article “Lessons from the Reverse Engineering of Nature” is long, complicated and, in the end, a bit too esoteric for my taste. It also contains a couple of unnecessarily dismissive references to genebanks. But it is worth sticking with for a section which occurs about half way through, and one paragraph in particular.

After describing a number of experiments in which researchers re-created a particular ecosystem, varying only the overall level of biodiversity (this is what he means by reverse engineering nature), Naeem says:

In spite of the limited number of species and tiny numbers of combinations involved, these studies have been stunningly successful at demonstrating that greater diversity means more biomass, more production, greater retention of nutrients, greater resistance to invasive species, greater resistance to the spread of plant pathogens and greater stability.

He goes on to quote a formal meta-analysis, but that succinct summary is definitely worth having to hand the next time someone asks you what species are good for. Naeem is pretty good on the mechanisms too.

Biodiversity loss can affect ecosystem functioning for many reasons, but two keep emerging from the research. First, the more species one removes, the greater the probability that an extraordinarily important species will be lost. But there is a second reason that biodiversity loss reduces ecosystem function: complementarity. The more species you have, the more ways they make use of limited resources such as light, water, nutrients and space.

And what goes for ecosystems goes for agroecosystems, right? Right.