- Patterns of Cereal Yield Growth across China from 1980 to 2010 and Their Implications for Food Production and Food Security. There has been yield stagnation over about 50% of total area of rice and maize, 15% of wheat.
- Genomic signatures of North American soybean improvement inform diversity enrichment strategies and clarify the impact of hybridization. 579 soybean varieties released 1940-2009 fall into 3 maturity groups, the overall diversity of which is not too different from the diversity of the ancestor landraces.
- Low-Coverage, Whole-Genome Sequencing of Artocarpus camansi (Moraceae) for Phylogenetic Marker Development and Gene Discovery. There’s been a whole genome duplication in Artocarpus.
- ColectoR, a Digital Field Notebook for Voucher Specimen Collection for Smartphones. So many of these things around.
- Potential ecosystem services of urban agriculture: a review. Important at local scale, not so much at global scale.
- Nineteenth century French rose (Rosa sp.) germplasm shows a shift over time from a European to an Asian genetic background. Ah, the lure of the exotic; 19 genetic groups, not corresponding to horticultural groups.
- Cryopreservation of in vitro shoot tips of strawberry by the vitrification method — establishment of a duplicate collection of Fragaria germplasm. The German national collection, including wild relatives, is a bit safer.
- Has land use pushed terrestrial biodiversity beyond the planetary boundary? A global assessment. Looks like it. Cross-reference with crop wild relatives?
- Traditional Banana Diversity in Oceania: An Endangered Heritage. Out of New Guinea…
- The contribution of international vegetable breeding to private seed companies in India. Vegetable breeding by AVRDC still has a role as R&D shifts to the private sector, but it’s different to what it was.
- Whole-genome sequencing of native sheep provides insights into rapid adaptations to extreme environments. Genomes of 77 Chinese breeds from extreme environments reveal genes likely to be useful in extreme environments.
`Planetary boundary’ dangers.
This Newbold et al. paper is an unjustified extension of the planetary boundaries framework. An explanation of this framework [Steffen W. et al. 2015 Planetary boundaries: Guiding human development on a changing planet. DOI: 10.1126/science.1259855] concludes: “Transgression of the PBs [Planetary boundaries] thus creates substantial risk of destabilizing the Holocene state of the ES [Earth system] in which modern societies have evolved.” But this totally ignores the major factor for human survival developed in the Holocene, that is, agriculture. The Newbold et al. paper suggests that a 10% reduction in the Biodiversity Intactness Index (BII) will undermine efforts towards long-term sustainable development. Newbold et al. also not only ignore the massive human breakthrough of the origin of agriculture in the Holocene but concludes: “Slowing or reversing the global loss of local biodiversity will require preserving the remaining areas of natural (primary) vegetation and, so far as possible, restoring human-used lands to natural (secondary) vegetation. Such an outcome would be beneficial for biodiversity, ecosystems and – at least in the long term – human wellbeing.” This is total rubbish – `human-used lands’, that is, agriculture, must be restored to secondary vegetation for human wellbeing – no way!
The argument that a 10% loss of biodiversity can compromise ecosystem function and somehow affect our food supply is deeply flawed. There are very many ecosystems with a single dominant plant species that do very well indeed: mangroves, reed beds, Spartina, marram grass, kelp, monodominant tropical forests and very many dominant stands of wild relatives of crops that were domesticated to provide most of our food (rice, sorghum, wheat, barley and lots more). The bottom line is that any one time we do not need high levels of plant biodiversity to provide ecosystem services. Most ecosystem services (and the habitat for a vast level of associated biodiversity) can be met by a range of single dominant plant species.
As for loss of pollinators, I once camped on the Red Sea coast of Yemen and woke up to find a little old lady up a date palm bashing the female flower spike with a bunch of male flowers (from another palm, of course). We have no honeybees whatever in our garden in Scotland and no sign they are needed (we do have lots of bumblebee species and other pollinators). The whole goings-on about loss of pollinators and biodiversity now targets poor people in tropical countries that have lost 15% of their land to nature reserves keeping people out (and stopping them growing the food that is urgently needed). This should be reversed rather than expanded, as demanded by Newbold et al..
A 15% increase in farmland would be gobbled up by 5 year’s population growth, assuming 3% per year. So if the nature preserves are providing significant net benefits to local people (ecotourism, beneficial insects, etc., corrected for any damage caused by the wild species being preserved), converting the preserves to farmland would be a mistake, even if we ignore long-term benefits of preserving biological resources.
But the whole planetary boundary thing seems arbitrary, especially when they say, in effect, “if we cross any of these boundaries there will be disastrous consequences, and we already have crossed some of them.” More biodiversity would be good, but are there really thresholds beyond which things suddenly fall apart? If so, do we know what those thresholds are, or are we making wild guesses?