- Next-generation sequencing strategies for characterizing the turkey genome. It never ends, does it. Meanwhile, we patiently await our jetpacks.
- Community-Based Management of Animal Genetic Resources (AnGR): Constraints and Prospects of AnGR Conservation in the Tropics. Best thing to do is improve the local breeds through village-level schemes. In Nigeria, that is.
- Comparison of seed viability among 42 species stored in a genebank. 80% loss in melon seed viability over 10 years sounds a bit high to me.
- Market Participation and Agro-Biodiversity Loss: The Case of Native Chili Varieties in the Amazon Rainforest of Peru. Selling to local retailers good for diversity, selling to wholesalers not so much.
- Stem and leaf rust resistance in wild relatives of wheat with D genome (Aegilops spp.). They all have it.
- Assessing rice and wheat germplasm collections using similarity groups. You can go quite far in identifying possible duplicates just with. passport data.
- Genetic Distinctiveness of the Herdwick Sheep Breed and Two Other Locally Adapted Hill Breeds of the UK. Close to each other geographically and ecologically, but quite genetically distinct. No word on whether village-level improvement necessary for their continued existence.
- Managing Potato Biodiversity to Cope with Frost Risk in the High Andes: A Modeling Perspective. Fancy maths confirms better to grow mixtures. Andean farmers nonplussed.
- Sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas L.) leaves as nutritional and functional foods. But they taste like shit. Just kidding, they’re good and good for you.
‘Assessing rice and wheat germplasm collections using similarity groups’ (Hazekamp, Payne and Sackville-Hamilton) I found to be an interesting and potentially valuable account of a piece of work relating to the identification of similarity groups of accessions of rice and wheat across a global range of germplasm collections.
One important question they addressed was ‘why identify similarity groups?’ (not to be confused with duplicates), and only time will tell whether their expectations will be met.
However, there are other issues that occurred to me. One is the relationship with ‘core collections’ (which are not mentioned in the article) of which there are now many, even for a single crop such as rice, and which are proven to be of considerable use (see: Genetic resources and conservation challenges under the threat of climate change, Ford-Lloyd, Engels and Jackson – in Plant genetic resources and climate change – Jackson, Ford-Lloyd and Parry, 2014) (sorry for the plug!). So, having identified similarity groups, is it now necessary to go back and redesign core collections? This seems unlikely, but it would perhaps be worthwhile checking core collections to see the extent of occurrence of ‘similar’ accessions. This might have particular value, not necessarily to ensure maximised diversity within core collections. It might be useful to look for similar accessions to those that have already proved to be of value within core collections, possibly revealing similarly adapted accessions of even greater value.
What, no mention of Khoury et al. in PNAS???
The modesty cat has your tongue?
I guess you’re working on a longer piece for this one, no?
Clem: I got bogged down with Khoury et al. The `axiomatic’ praise of the value of diversity in the first two sentences does not further investigate the `certain ranges’ where diversity is not needed. In fact in very many types of vegetation where ecosystem services are needed to stabilise substrate (mud, sand, bare soil or whatever) the work is done by one specialist species: Spartina, Rhizophora, Ulex, Phragmites, sea grass, Mora and lots more. Diversity does not get a look-in here. Given the polarity between benign conditions, allowing multi-species interactions (and all the benefits of this) versus more stringent conditions, capable of being met only by monotypic specialists (providing unique benefits), then which is the better model for arable farming, where a major constraint worldwide is weed control? My bet is on the monodominant specialists – the wonderful range of crop species we have now which were chosen by early farmers who probably knew more hands-on ecology than we do.
We are already getting some kind of seas-change with the recognition of `hyperdominance’ in the Amazonian tree flora.
As for within-species diversity, that is always going to be needed for breeding (and for in-field adaptation to such as climate change) but I get the feeling that monodominants in nature may be quite uniform – for example many clonal species such as Eichhornia. How do they survive when the ecological `axiom’ is that they should collapse?
Bogged down? That doesn’t sound good. Maybe the tongue better stay with the cat.
Luigi: Thanks. I’ve tried and failed to see any relation between `Species diversity has been shown to stimulate productivity, stability, ecosystem services, and resilience in natural (1–5) and in agricultural ecosystems (6–13)’ and dietary diversity as represented by a plate of food. All the references are to species mixtures in ecosystems (and experimental plots).
With rare exceptions – salad leave and the like – food crops are marketed as single species and then eaten as recipes of multiple species on one plate (and then in meal with various contrasting courses). The mixture at this stage has nothing whatever to do with species diversity within each crop plot. We have an excellent diet without the eco-mumbo-jumbo of productivity, stability, ecosystem services, and resilience by our use of a garden with separate production plots for separate types of food crops: orchard for apples, soft-fruit plot, a few nut trees, greenhouses for salads and tender vegetables, potato bed, and the rest. One critique of Tilman-type diversity experiments noted that all the claimed ecological benefits could be multiplied by a factor of ten with a few handfuls of NPK.
Although the reason is not mentioned in the Khoury et al. paper, the striking change in nutrition (and production) has been in such as soybean, palm oil and sunflower: all introduced crops grown away from their Centres of Origin. Surely the lesson for both food security and dietary diversity is to get crops introduced as wide as possible. All those Asian vegetables and Latin America fruits and sago palm and peach palm to be swapped around the tropics. Cacao and coffee and citrus and lots more are better off grown all over the place than in their disease-prone homelands.
Off the dig the garden.