- Plant diversity modifies multi-trophic interactions in croplands, grasslands and forests. Increasing plant diversity changes the interactions between plants, herbivores and their natural enemies, but exactly how depends on the ecosystem. Diversification’s pest-suppression magic looks like a farming-specific trick, not a universal law.
- High-resolution carbon and biodiversity mapping shows correlated losses across space and agricultural products. Carbon loss and biodiversity loss from farming turn out to hit the same ground: two-thirds of both concentrated on one-third of agricultural land, with beef and milk alone responsible for 41% of the biodiversity damage. Good news for anyone hoping one policy lever could do double duty.
- Harnessing agri-food system microbiomes for sustainability and human health. Soil to gut, it’s all one network, linking ecosystem function, food production and human health across the entire agri-food system.
- Breeding for beneficial microbial associations. If microbiomes matter that much, why not breed for them? A proposed framework pairs crop traits that recruit good microbes (root exudates, architecture) with soil practices that keep those microbes around, since good genetics on ruined soil gets you nowhere. This means designing crops as participants in ecological networks rather than as isolated organisms.
- Host genetics and social relationships jointly shape fitness-associated microbiome variation in a population of feral horses. Nature’s own microbiome-breeding program: seven years of horse poop from Sable Island shows gut microbes predict winter survival, and related horses share microbes more than chance allows. So the functional unit of adaptation is the animal plus its microbiome.
Putting names and faces to organic seed diversity
LIVESEEDING is a project…
…to foster the growth of the organic sector and transition towards more sustainable local food systems by delivering high quality organic seed of diverse cultivars adjusted to organic farming for a wide range of crops.
It is funded by Horizon Europe (Innovation Action), the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation and UK Research and Innovation, and gathers 37 partners from 16 countries.
The project is producing some interesting resources, but the ones I like best are actually a little difficult to find on their website. So difficult, in fact, that I have to resort to linking to them via a search result on Organic Farm Knowledge.
They are plant genetic cards, each providing information on a specific cultivar, “supporting its identification, conservation, cultivation and use by farmers, seed practitioners, breeders, researchers and other stakeholders of the seed system.”
Here’s a little piece of one such card from Greece.
There’s also something called the EU Organic Seed Database “to create more transparency for the EU member states and for plant reproductive material suppliers regarding available offers of organic plant reproductive materials and to increase the supply of organic plant reproductive material in the EU member states and Switzerland.”
To be honest, I haven’t really played around with it enough to form a definitive judgement, but it does seem a little complicated to navigate at first blush. If anyone has a go, and has an opinion, please let me know in the comments. However, the plant genetic cards do have links to possible sources of seeds.
Biodiversity plans need genebanks
A new FAO policy brief analyses how the 78 revised National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans (NBSAPs) submitted to the CBD as of February 2026 treat agrifood systems.
The headline numbers: All 78 NBSAPs that were looked at include agrifood-related targets and actions: 63% of all national targets are implemented through agrifood-related actions, and 36% of all planned actions (4,381 of 12,332) relate to agrifood systems. I think that’s pretty good. Togo tops the list with 80% of its actions being agrifood-related, built around agroecology, sustainable forest management and genetic resource use.
The genetic resources for food and agriculture (GRFA) angle: Of the 55-item typology of agrifood actions tracked, sustainable use of GRFA appears in 74% of NBSAPs and conservation of GRFA in 70%, so both are relatively well covered. But two other pieces of the puzzle lag: inventory and characterization of GRFA sits at only 49%, and access and benefit-sharing of GRFA at 48%. So countries seem to be readier to commit to using and conserving genetic resources than to the maybe less glamorous work of cataloguing what they have or sorting out benefit-sharing arrangements.
The report’s six policy recommendations essentially argue for turning these paper commitments into funded, monitored action, particularly flagging aquaculture, agroecology, rights-based governance, and finance as areas needing a bit of a push.
This is a genuinely thorough policy analysis: 78 NBSAPs coded against a 55-item action typology is real work. But to me it was a little frustrating that twelve pages on agrifood systems never get to grips with the infrastructure that actually keeps agricultural biodiversity — the foundation of healthy agrifood system — alive. Protected areas are mentioned, but there’s nothing specifically on national or international genebanks or on-farm conservation; no Plant Treaty and its access and benefit-sharing system either. I can’t believe none of these were mentioned in the NBSAPs. Conservation and sustainable use of GRFA end up as generic line items in a typology, without much sense of what “conservation” looks like in practice, or who’s actually doing the inventorying that only half of countries have committed to.
It’s solid policy-text analysis, but it stays resolutely, almost defiantly, high-level. It’s a report on commitments on biodiversity in and for agriculture that doesn’t recognize that at least for crop diversity, a global genebank system is being built to help carry them out. Seems a pity.
50 years of cassava diversity: what went into the bank, and what came out
Two new papers in Plants, published two months apart, tell the story of CIAT’s cassava genebank 1 from opposite ends: how the collection was assembled and conserved, and what breeders have actually done with it. Read together, they amount to a remarkably candid 50-year audit of a slow-motion agricultural asset. I’ll just give you the main beats here. It’s really worth reading both papers in full.
Part I is the origin story. Botanist Victor Manuel Patiño’s 1969–70 expeditions alone brought in roughly a third of today’s 5,000 or so cassava landraces, transported as stem cuttings across Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela and beyond, often in difficult conditions and under changing quarantine rules.
The collection has its blind spots: Brazil and the Guianas remain poorly represented 2, passport information can be patchy, and the overwhelmingly male composition of historical collecting teams probably meant that some of the varietal knowledge held by women farmers went unrecorded.
Conservation itself has been a moving target. It has evolved from field genebanks to in vitro slow-growth tissue culture storage after a frogskin-disease scare forced the field collection to close in 2003, and now cryopreservation at CIAT’s Future Seeds facility. Meanwhile, DNA fingerprinting keeps revealing an awkward truth familiar to genebank curators everywhere: the names people give varieties and the genetic identities of the material do not always agree. A lot of effort over the years has also gone into testing for pathogens to ensure that distribution is safe.
Part II asks what all this diversity is actually for? The answer has also changed considerably over five decades. Early researchers chased traits such as high protein and low cyanogenic content before turning towards yield and starch percentage in the Green Revolution era.
The payoffs have been considerable: landraces have contributed traits such as resistance to pests and diseases, adaptation to acid soils and highland cold, and quality traits for fresh-market cooking versus industrial starch. The route from accession to released variety is rarely direct: a landrace gets screened for a trait, crossed, then recombined and selected over several more generations before anything reaches a farmer’s field. The results include varieties like Nataima-3, bred for whitefly resistance thanks to an Ecuadorian landrace. At the same time, the authors argue that cassava breeding now needs to move beyond broad phenotypic selection towards more systematic use of inbred lines, because the crop’s high heterozygosity makes the introduction of specific traits particularly difficult.
The two papers therefore tell a big story about genebanks. Collecting diversity is only the beginning; its value is realized decades later, when a breeder encounters a problem that nobody could have anticipated when the stuff was first collected. The cassava collection is a long-term portfolio of biological options, one whose contents have taken half a century to assemble, whose inventory is still being corrected, and whose most valuable assets may be the ones that have not yet been used.
A new project is looking to genetically engineer cassava to photosynthesize more efficiently at higher temperatures. I do wonder whether someone has already checked whether any of those 5,000 landraces might help with that. Maybe they can’t, but it’s worth having a look. And you never know, something else of interest might jump out. That’s the beauty of large international collections of crop diversity such as CIAT’s.
Conserving the tangle of grapevines
I think we may have already pointed to Conservation gap analysis for wild grapevines (Vitis L.) of the Americas, the latest in a series of papers by our friend Colin Khoury and a rotating assortment of colleagues on the conservation status of the crop wild relatives of the Americas, genepool by genepool. The authors compiled occurrence records for 38 wild American grapevine taxa, and used fancy GIS to infer the overall distribution and environmental niche of each. They then assessed the degree of representation of each taxon in genebanks and protected areas, and hence any remaining conservation gaps. Here’s the headline finding:
We categorize 25 of 38 of the taxa as urgent priority and 10 as high priority for improving ex situ conservation representation. Three taxa are assessed as urgent and 29 as high priority for enhancing in situ conservation. Further action, with emphasis on conservation gap hotspots, is needed to more comprehensively conserve wild Vitis native to the Americas.
Which is pretty clear.
Or is it?
What if “taxa” are perhaps not always the best units of conservation to use in assessing conservation efforts?
That may in fact be one of the implications of a paper that came out just a few weeks after that of Colin and friends: The dynamics of introgression and parallel adaptation across North American Vitis species.
These authors show that introgression and hybridization are pervasive and evolutionarily important across North American Vitis, based on genomic analysis of 639 accessions representing 48 species. About 14% of the average genome shows evidence of introgression, particularly associated with areas where species come into contact. Some taxa usually regarded as hybrid species are in fact better understood as ever-changing hybrid swarms, rather than distinct evolutionary lineages. Most importantly, the authors find that introgressed genetic variants have repeatedly contributed to adaptation in different species. The paper therefore portrays Vitis diversity as a reticulate network — or tangle — of species, populations and gene flow, rather than a set of discrete species.
This has important implications for conservation: hybrid zones and admixed populations may be really significant reservoirs of adaptive diversity. The framework of the first paper might potentially underestimate the conservation importance of regions where these occur, if they contain substantial genetic variation but aren’t well represented by the taxonomic units used in the gap analysis. For example, it might happen that two neighbouring species are reasonably well represented ex situ, but not from the specific regions where they hybridize and introgression occurs.
This suggests a useful next, synthetic step: take the geographic gaps from the first paper and overlay them with the evidence for introgression and gene flow networks from the second. The resulting map could identify not just under-collected species, but under-collected (or under-conserved in situ) evolutionary processes and genetic mixtures. That could be valuable for designing the next Vitis collecting mission.