Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
So I was playing around with the agriculture data on WRI’s EarthTrends the other day. Actually it’s mainly — though not entirely — data from FAOStat, and there are the usual provisos about the methodology. 1 But look at what has been happening to turkey numbers in developed countries lately.
Numbers doubled between 2003 and 2004! Is that real? If so, what’s been driving the trend?
Help me out here. What is so “worthy of praise” about getting duplicates of several hundred wheat accessions from the USDA and ICARDA genebanks and putting them into another genebank? Surely the Tunisian genebank is up to much more praiseworthy stuff.
DIVERSEEDS is a scientific project supported fully by the European Commission´s 6th framework programme. We are “Networking on conservation and use of plant genetic resources in Europe and Asia.”
And I think we may have mentioned them before. Anyway, the latest news from the network is that they have a DVD out:
This documentary shows why biodiversity is important for agriculture and how it is conserved and used in many different locations in Europe and Asia.
The DVD costs about US$40, but you can get a discount if you order five or more. I haven’t seen it, so I can’t tell you much more about it. But the contents seems to consist of a series of fifteen or so short (average 3 minutes) films on a wide variety of agrobiodiversity conservation and use initiatives, ranging from the Austrian NGO Arche Noah, to the Thai genebank, to crop wild relatives in the Fertile Crescent, to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. I’ll try to get hold of a copy and report.
Kris’s Archaeology Blog at About.com:Archaeology has a challenging quiz about domestication. I got 15/20. You?
Apologies to anyone who tried to look at the site over the past couple of days and saw the enigmatic message “It Works!”. We had not in fact been hacked. It was a hangover from earlier attempts to migrate to a new server. Unfortunately the server administrator was on holiday, so there was nothing we could do about it. The first thing he did on his return was to get everything operational, even if the site isn’t quite as pretty as it might have been. Or is it better? Let us know. About other stuff too.
More tweaks later, if necessary.