- ITPGRFA launches stakeholder consultation on sustainable use. First order of business: figure out what the heck it is.
- Maybe Wageningen’s new professor of organic agriculture will know.
- IRRI finds healthy rice. Meanwhile, out on the front lines…
- HarvestPlus puts out an annual report. HarvestChoice gets to grips with lablab. Yeah I find the whole HarvestFillintheblank thing confusing too.
- Nature Education does genebanks. “Ex situ conservation appears to be effective; in situ conservation has few proponents except those who practice it out of necessity.” Whoa, easy, tiger!
- And speaking of education, here are some teaching resources in ethnobiology.
- Some of which may be useful to interesting yoofs in agriculture?
- Raiders of the Lost Coffee Bean? I would have avoided the Indiana Jones parallel, frankly.
- How banana and cereals genomics is going to get us all personal jetpacks.
- In the meantime, a banana tissue culture expert nabs ICAR Punjabrao Deshmukh Outstanding Woman Scientist Award 2011.
- What new technologies would most benefit conservation? DNA and IT, mostly, apparently, naturally.
- Coca Cola sustainable agriculture guy mentions pollinator biodiversity but not citrus biodiversity.
- Profile of the head of agriculture at the Gates Foundation.
- Kew’s Samara does mountain biodiversity, crop wild relatives and much more besides.
- Taro research in Hawaii summarized in a nice PDF.
- Biological and linguistic diversity go together like a, what, horse and carriage?
- The medieval fall of the Irish cow. And the Harappan origins of the curry. Esoteric, moi?
Kew’s `Samara’ has a lead article by Watson. He claims: “Biodiversity provides a variety of ecosystem services that humankind relies on…” But `biodiversity’ provides nothing: it is a measure of the range of plants and animal species in a lesser or greater area. The ecosystem services are provided by one or more individual species (and if one species, it cannot be `biodiversity’). This distinction is important, as even in tropical forests some environmental conditions dictate monodominance or `monotypic’ forest. Here `biodiversity’ of the key producer species is stripped down to `bio-uniformity’.
In many marginal conditions (e.g. estuaries, sand-dunes, salt marshes, turtle-grass beds) – where the ecosystem services of soil formation and silt capture are at a premium – it can be argued that single specifically adapted species provide the predominant ecosystem services.
Watson also claims: “It is important that reforestation programmes use ensembles of native species and not monoculture plantations of exotic species.” Here is the dogma again: “ensembles”, rather then best adapted species for whatever ecosystem service needed. If I want teak across the seasonally drier tropics I grow teak, not an “ensemble” of native species. If I want to protect the coast in a tropical estuary I encourage Rhizophora mangrove (the exact single species depending of which ocean I happen to be next to), that traps silt and which can be used for charcoal, tannin, and the once highly-valuable roof timbers across southern Arabia.
The idea that `biodiversity’ – that is, a natural concoction of species – can deliver ecosystem services needs to be challenged before it does any more harm. It is certainly not true in marginal, stressed environments – for example, the single-dominant-species bamboo zone often found on tropical mountains.
And for arable farming it could be argued that the field is stressed by ploughing and weeding to allow the growth of only one species producing food (in contrast to tropical forest gardens, where the more `benign’ conditions allow a range of crops for food and other ecosystem services).
If `ecosystem services’ continue to be used as a reason to conserve biodiversity, then we may end up spending a fortune conserving the wrong thing – rare and endangered species and complex tropical forests – when we should be looking at far simpler vegetation types with far fewer (and I suspect far more common) species.