Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
Meike, on GMO introgression “risk” mapped:
We have not only uploaded the maps … but also the raw data that we have used for mapping the distributions of the crop wild relatives (as grid, Google Earth kml, and excel files). So before searching GBIF, SINGER and other online databases: you might save yourself some (a lot!) time if you have a look here first, because we have already done this for most of the wild relatives of 20 different crops!
Are you worried that an organic garden on the White House grounds might cause some Americans to start eating a wide variety of chemical-free, locally grown produce? The Mid America CropLife Association, a lobbying group for agribusinesses giants, is.
Darren Naish at Tetrapod Zoology gives an overview of the cattle of Asia, with pictures. A couple of take home messages, for me. One is that the domestication of various bovids is pretty complex, with hybrids, feral forms, wild relatives and all combinations thereof in existence. The other is this conversation-stopping tidbit: “domestic cattle don’t need to shiver or employ other thermoregulatory tricks even in temperatures approaching -20° C”. Why not? Go read Darren’s post, and then reconsider the “fleshy dewlaps, tall dorsal ridges and other structures” that are typical of tropical types.
And this is what the veteran crop conservationist says:
Gene banks like the SADC gene bank, the Svalbard gene bank, and many others, focus only on collecting and preserving. How can you think you are conserving diversity when the very source upon which the seeds depend is not included? You can capture only so much, and in 100 years it will be useless because the planet will have changed. Perhaps you will be able to incorporate some genetic material into varieties and release them, but who is going to benefit from that? That is the big question.
I know what he means. You need to conserve the process, as well as the product. But I have another big question. If the world — read the climate — is changing as fast as many now fear, don’t you need the insurance policy that genebanks provide all the more?
The Future of Plant Genetic Resources is a one-day meeting to be held on 14 May 2009 at the Linnean Society in the heart of London’s fashionable West End. The meeting honours Jack Hawkes, Past President of the LinnSoc, who
devoted his long and illustrious career to the study of plant genetic resources. His meeting with the Russian plant geneticist Nicolai Vavilov in St. Petersburg in 1938 was in his own words “an experience that changed my life”; working with Jack was an experience that changed the lives of many of today’s plant breeders. Jack’s work on potatoes and their wild relatives was at the centre of a broad interest in the conservation and utilization of plant genetic resources, and his vision and legacy are widely celebrated – he has been called “the father of germplasm banks”. In this day meeting we will honour Jack and his many contributions by examining the future of plant genetic resources in today’s scientific setting.
There’s a pretty stellar line-up of speakers, and of course we’d be interested in a report, if you go.