Back to the wild
As promised, the new BGjournal is out, and the topic is “Ecological restoration and the role of botanic gardens.” Remember, this is the one with the paper on inter situ conservation:
One of the first places that this idea has caught on is on the properties of the National Tropical Botanical Garden (NTBG) and those of collaborating landowners. At Lāwa’i-kai, the uniquely beautiful coastal property managed by NTBG as part of the historic Allerton Gardens on Kaua`i’s south shore, just a few kilometers from Makauwahi Cave, invasive vegetation has been removed from the beach strand and coastal forest and replaced with not just the three hardy native plant species that had persisted there, but dozens of other natives that cores collected from the adjacent marsh as well as the detailed record from other sites along the south shore such as Makauwahi shows were there when the Polynesians arrived a little more than a millennium ago.
Help for coffee farmers in Central America
From Andy Jarvis:
What if major coffee regions in Latin America were to disappear altogether in the next generation? What would that mean for you as a consumer? Or your children? And what about coffee farmers in Latin America? And their children? What will they do if their livelihoods disappear? At CIAT (International Center for Tropical Agriculture), we have been working for years to develop crop targeting tools based on climate scenarios that show how climate change could alter production systems throughout the region in the years to come. We propose to expand our work to generate a range of possible scenarios for changing patterns of land use in Mexico and Central America, and to partner with CRS (Catholic Relief Services) to help coffee farmers develop strategies to more effectively mitigate and adapt to the impacts of climate change under each one. In collaboration with CRS, we can directly impact 7000 farmers and generate learning that helps hundreds of thousands more.
Like the idea? Then vote for it!
Partially relevant nominative determinism
Not strictly relevant to our self-imposed beat, of course, but as it already gave my compadre Luigi a quick post I feel I ought to share …
There’s a strange phenomenon (in whose origin, I freely admit, I had some impact) called nominative determinism. Briefly, your name suits your job and, of course, vice versa. Thus Lord Brain was an eminent neurologist before he was ennobled. So at a talk this morning on wise management of water resources, I perked up when I saw that the crucial research on partial rootzone drying was by a man called Peter Dry. Luigi was good enough to check the reference, and indeed, Hormonal changes induced by partial rootzone drying of irrigated grapevine exists and Dry is one of the authors.
All fun aside, it is a valuable technique for reducing water use by up to 50% while still maintaining good grape production and, apparently, a pretty drinkable vintage. No word though of whether the wine was a tad brut too.
Twitter for plants
What every self-respecting field genebank should have.