Nibbles: ITPGRFA consultation, Organic Wageningen, Rice good and bad, HarvestXXX, Genebank education, Ethnobiology teaching, YPARD, Wild coffee prospecting, Banana & cereal genomics, In vitro award, Coca Cola and conservation, Sam Dryden, Samara, Taro in Hawaii, Biodiversity and languages, Ancient food

One Reply to “Nibbles: ITPGRFA consultation, Organic Wageningen, Rice good and bad, HarvestXXX, Genebank education, Ethnobiology teaching, YPARD, Wild coffee prospecting, Banana & cereal genomics, In vitro award, Coca Cola and conservation, Sam Dryden, Samara, Taro in Hawaii, Biodiversity and languages, Ancient food”

  1. 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.

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