Inventorying, characterising and conserving on-farm ancient olive trees is a priority for safeguarding their genetic, natural and agricultural value and for protecting ancient genotypes threatened with extinction.
An important result is that the genetic diversity conserved on farm is complementary to that found in the genebank indicating that both systems are required for a more efficient crop diversity conservation.
Farmers exchange seed through a suite of methods and institutions, determined by social, economic, geographic, and environmental factors (Jensen et al. 2013), and these dynamics can determine the extent to which crop diversity is conserved on farms, and the potential for future in situ conservation (Thomas et al. 2011).
It is therefore important that these landraces are conserved on-farm as well as ex situ and genetic studies undertaken on them as they might harbour useful traits that may find utility in rice improvement.
It would also be useful, in the meantime, to exploit and conserve rice fish farming as eco-tourism resources, so that the income of the mountainous farmers can be increased and this important, indigenous agro-culture be conserved and developed.
Already, irrigation has been stopped in large areas formerly devoted to rice paddies, and water-conserving farm methods will be introduced upstream while other areas are restored to forest and grassland.
The study concludes with a discussion of C policy in California, and recommends that policy makers reconsider the importance of C stocks in agricultural systems for GHG mitigation as well as for improving farm stewardship, conserving wildlands, and/or incorporate planting of native trees and vegetation on farm properties.
Conserving grassland birds in farmed landscapes requires the maintenance of favourable agricultural land uses over a range of spatial and temporal scales.
The permit auction could easily raise $1trn per year to spend on climate solutions, and most of that money would be spent in developing countries – paying for them to conserve their forests, farm sustainably, and "leapfrog" the carbon-intensive development path by paying for new energy infrastructure based on renewables and the efficient use of energy.
And also that they reduce the need to spray chemical pesticides, the amounts of fungal toxins that end up in food, soil erosion and the release of CO2 into the atmosphere, and that they conserve water and farm land.
Although clearly Westerners have helped save the mountain gorillas, it is Africans who bear the actual costs of conserving the apes, which raid farms and monopolize precious forests in addition to generating revenues from tourism.
