- Population structure and diversity in cultivated and wild Luffa species. Luffa hermaphrodita is the closest wild species.
- Factors Enhancing Landrace in Situ Conservation in Home Gardens and Fields in Vall de Gósol, Catalan Pyrenees, Iberian Peninsula. It’s not just about landrace performance.
- Sorghum Genetic Resources: Conservation and Diversity Assessment for Enhanced Utilization in Sorghum Improvement. 236,000 accessions, 38,000 at ICRISAT alone, of which 3 have proved useful. Wait, what?
- Genetic Diversity in Eucalypts. It’s high, and needs to be used.
- Explaining the decrease in the genetic diversity of wheat in France over the 20th century. Because breeding.
- Animal-breeding schemes using genomic information need breeding plans designed to maximise long-term genetic gains. You can’t just wing it.
- Remaining natural vegetation in the global biodiversity hotspots. 15%, and fragmented.
- Targeting Global Protected Area Expansion for Imperiled Biodiversity. Increasing protected area coverage to Aichi targets would do little to achieve threatened species coverage in situ, at least for vertebrates.
- Phenotypic evaluation and characterization of a collection of Malus species. German apple collection characterized the old school way, and none the worse for that.
genetic diversity of wheat in France:
This argues: “Crop diversity in the field (between and within species) has been identified as a key factor for crop resilience …” and then gives Zhu et al. 2000 as a reference for this. What Zhu et al. found has very little to do with diversity: it was a good example of the power of modern plant breeding for disease resistance in a major rice variety protecting a minor (but favoured) susceptible variety from disease. To my mind the best factors for crop resilience are: 1) moving existing varieties around through crop introduction (the basis for the past resilience and dominance of US crop production; 2) good genebanks feeding good diversity (i.e. quality over quantity) to breeding programmes. This has little to do with maintaining within-field diversity.
If I sound sour it is because our small plots of a dozen heritage and standard potato varieties in the veggie garden have all been taken out by blight in the past week; no resilience related to diversity there.