This post was first published on 6 September 2012 on the CCAFS blog. Read the original post here. By Flora Mer The Climate Analogues tool is back, and showing its versatility once again. At the beginning of this year, Bioversity International showed an interest in using the tool, developed by CCAFS, within their newly launched
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We are happy to announce the launch of the Crop Wild Relatives and Climate Change website. The site is dedicated to compiling and providing information on the taxonomy, distribution, conservation status and breeding potential of the wild relatives of major crops. Developed under the project “Adapting Agriculture to Climate Change: Collecting, Protecting, and Preparing Crop
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Crop Wild Relatives (CWR), like many plant species worldwide, face increasing threats in many regions from habitat destruction, transitions in agricultural practices, and invasive species, among other factors.  Although the weedy nature of many CWR may make this group of plants more resilient to human impacts than more sensitive plant groups, a substantial proportion of
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See this item on the CIFOR Forests Blog » Online tool helps users map the costs of conserving Amazon forests, on the interactive online tool MAPAZ.  CIFOR leads the new CGIAR Research Program on Forests, Trees and Agroforestry (CRP6).  Last week at CIFOR Headquarters a workshop on sentinel sites for the CRP6 was held. CIFOR also conducted
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On the 10th of December, the Global Crop Diversity Trust announced that Norway pledged US 50 million for the conservation of wild genepools of major crops. Read the official press release here, and take a look at Cary Fowler’s (Executive Director of the Trust) talk on the TED Global Conference, clever and encouraging: CIAT and
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Last week I had the pleasure of a day and a half in Cartagena (Colombia) attending the Latin American Congress of Chemistry.   Yes – chemistry.  The irony of the fact that I dropped chemistry at 14 years of age having not understood a quarter of what they taught me was not lost.  But the
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A nice set of papers just came out on Diversity and Distributions about conservation biogeography. Despite all articles (except the editorial letter, and one on climate change and conservation, a topic that we have referred several times) are behind a paywall, turns a nice collection of papers with different topics, ranging from data issues, to
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Last week, Jeff Price, a WWF scientist member of The Wallace Initiative had a meeting in Tanzania, with conservationists and policy makers, pretty much similar to the meeting we held at CIAT a couple of months ago. During that meeting, Jeff used much of our modeling outputs to teach how biodiversity conservation should be done
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Last year during a meeting at Copenhagen in March, our program leader Andy Jarvis performed a set of very interesting presentations on the impacts of climate change on agriculture and biodiversity. Luckily, and thanks to our hard work, and to substantial efforts done by Jeff Price from WWF, Rachel Warren from Tyndall Centre,  and to
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As the world gets warmer, plants are expected to change physiological and ecological responses to the environment. A recent article in the journal Trends in Plant Science, part of the research done by Prof. Josep Penuelas and Dr. Michael Staudt, from the Autonomous University of Barcelona (Spain) indicates that volatile compounds producing fragrances in plants are likely
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