Afghanistan has published its first list of threatened wildlife that can no longer be hunted or harvested. The list currently includes 20 mammals, 7 birds, and 4 plants, although they hope to expand the list to as many as 70 species by the end of the year.
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Africa's forests are disappearing faster than those in other areas of the world due to a lack of land ownership.
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Yosemite National Park is seeing a decrease in the average size of their largest trees (as a result of larger trees dying), likely as a result of climate change. The dying off of large trees is concerning because it is occurring in one of the world's most protected parks.
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The Natrue Conservancy published reports of its study showing that many reefs all around the world are now functionally extinct due to fishing practices and coastal developments. This is having a hugely negative effect on shellfish populations and damaging entire sensitive ecosystems. As a specific example, it points out that 85% of the world's ocean reefs have already been lost.
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Scientists have been working on producing more flood tolerant varieties of rice in order to lower the loses in rice harvest that occur every year due to flooding conditions.
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The Global Crop Diversity Trust, the group who brought us the Doomsday Seed Vault in Svalbard, Norway are in a global hunt of the world’s seedbanks for ‘climate proof’ crop varieties.
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Native Seeds/SEARCH is a seed bank that specializes in creating drought-tolerant seeds from the southwestern United States and northwestern Mexico.
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60 Minutes look at the Svalbard "Doomsday" Seed Vault.
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While protected areas such as national parks have been established to conserve charismatic animal and plant species, very few have been set aside to protect wild plants from which our crops originate, a WWF report reveals.
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A project designed to protect the worlds crop supply was yesterday launched, with the Norwegian government announcing it is to develop a Noah's Arc of global seeds.
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Historically, humans utilized more than 7,000 plant species to meet their basic food needs, Esquinas says. Today, due to the limitations of modern large-scale, mechanized farming, only 150 plant species are under cultivation, and the majority of humans live on only 12 plant species, according to research by the Food and Agriculture Organization.
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The International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), focuses on plants suitable for sustainable agriculture in arid climates. ICARDA banks seeds from 131,000 varieties of plants, gathered from across the Middle East, Central Asia and North Africa. Unfortunately, according to a recent editorial in Nature, political tensions between the West and Syria may threaten ICARDA's already tenuous operations. Worse, ICARDA is not alone -- many seed banks elsewhere are struggling to preserve their collections.
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The Global Crop Diversity Trust, an initiative to conserve in perpetuity the Earth's most crucial agricultural biodiversity, entered into force today as an independent international organization.
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The world could lose its crop diversity -- vital to food security -- if plant gene banks were not immediately safeguarded for future generations, Christopher Higgins, Director of the United Kingdom's Medical Research Council Clinical Sciences Centre, said today at the Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development.
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