Here’s a bunch of better-late-than-never links, some of which will be good this time next year.
- A new book on Plant Genetic Resources and Climate Change.
- I expect it covers sorghum, which NPR calls the “camel of crops”.
- Wonder whether they’ll cover sorghum at the Tucson Plant Breeding Institute course in January 2014. h/t Crops for the Future.
- Last week’s International Congress on Quinoa. Pretty sure our invitation got lost in the mail.
- As was our invitation to Kew’s one-day symposium on herbal medicines and food supplements.
- Annals of Botany explains how compensation may underly the benefits of genetic diversity – in Arabidopsis. (And thanks for the shout-out.)
- ICRISAT struts its stuff in Nigeria with new varieties of groundnut and millet. As ever, we ask: who’s looking after the old varieties?
- Diverse beers for Halloween – one to cut out and keep.
Annals of Botany paper: `Monocultures’ again. “Phenotypically dissimilar genotypes of Arabidopsis thaliana were grown in monocultures and mixtures” No they were not: they all monocultures of Arabidopsis thaliana. Some treatments were phenotypically the same, some were phenotypically different, but unless they included more than one species they were monocultures.
Yes, I think we all get the point now.
Luigi: I don’t think all the people will ever get the point.
We may even be looking in the wrong place about monocultures/polycultures. It could be not just the species mixture but also the genetic variation within each of the component species in mixtures that determines the fate of mixtures.
There is an interesting paper (open access) by Booth and Grime on the relationship between the variation within a species related to the interaction between species over time.
The first sentence of the introduction argued that: “Plant ecologists are prominent among those who have recognized the theoretical possibility that genetic variation within populations plays an important part in the maintenance of biodiversity in communities.”
Booth and Grime thought that: “…the mechanisms responsible for the diversity, stability and predictable species composition of ancient, species-rich limestone pastures may depend upon contact and interaction between particular genotypes of different species.”
For an experiment with different combinations of 11 species of long-lived herbaceous perennials they concluded that “…genetic diversity within component species reduced the rate at which species diversity declined.”
This seems to be more relevant for crops that the Arabidopsis paper and confusion over just what monocultures are. How about wheat fields in Ethiopia with several species of Triticum and variation within each species? How do they interact to maintain diversity?
Has anyone done similar studies on crops?
Maybe this recent paper on the genetic structure of barley population at the landscape scale in Ethiopia is relevant: “Population genetic structure in a social landscape: barley in a traditional Ethiopian agricultural system.”