Author: Jeremy Cherfas

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Nibbles: Irrigation squared, Saffron, Chickpeas, Coastal trees, Cucurbits

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Australia offers agriculture fellowship

Happy to broadcast this opportunity.

The Crawford Fund is now calling for nominations for its Crawford Fund Fellowship for 2010.

The Crawford Fund Fellowship has been set up to provide further training for an agricultural scientist whose work has shown potential. This prestigious Award provides an opportunity for the successful candidate to spend a period of focussed study and training in Australia, with resulting benefits to the Awardee as well as to their country’s agriculture and to Australia.

Candidates should be below the age of 35 and from a selected group of developing countries (Bangladesh, Bhutan, Burma, Cambodia, East Timor, Fiji, Indonesia, Laos, Nepal, Niue, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Is, Tonga, Tuvalu and Kiribati, Vanuatu or Vietnam).

Applications close 12 April 2010. More details, application forms, etc etc here.

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Invasiveness and extinction revisited

If you’ve been following (listening to?) our tweets 1 you might have seen this enigmatic little gem:

Population genetic diversity influences colonization success. K. M. CRAWFORD. Molecular Ecology: http://goo.gl/JFHh

And, possibly, ignored it. It must have registered at some level though, because when I saw Inbreeding bad for invasives too at C.J.A. Bradshaw’s blog Conservationbytes.com I thought, “Hmmn, I wonder if that’s the thing we tweeted”. 2 And it was. Bradshaw does a great job of explaining how it is that reduced genetic diversity contributes not only to a population’s risk of extinction, but also to its ability to invade new habitats.

Crawford & Whitney measured greater population-level seedling emergence rates, biomass production, flowering duration and reproduction in high-diversity populations compared to lower-diversity ones. Maintain a high genetic diversity and your invasive species has a much higher potential to colonise a novel environment and spread throughout it.

Of course, this is related to propagule pressure because the more individuals that invade/are introduced the more times, the higher the likelihood that different genomes will be introduced as well.

So far the experimental evidence comes only from Arabidopsis thaliana, the white rat of the plant biologist. But I’d be willing to bet that if you could measure such a thing as invasiveness and persistence for crop varieties, where people, rather than nature, determine how many propagules survive and spread, the ones that are both widespread and long-lasting are also the ones with the most genetic diversity.

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Save seeds, Kenyan tells Japan

Wangari Maathai, tree-hugger and board member of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, has been in Japan seeking Japan’s leadership for the conservation of agricultural biodiversity, in advance of the Nagoya meeting of the parties to the Conference of Biological Diversity in October.

“If we don’t protect what we have, you never know what the scientists of tomorrow will need” to allow people to produce crops that could not grow before, she said, adding, “That is why these diversities are important.” She talked about her visit to a Kyoto temple where she learned the Japanese word “tomoiki,” which refers to the concept of coexistence with nature, and said it is “something the world needs to learn.” Maathai became widely known for adopting the Japanese word “mottainai” — loosely meaning “You should save it” — in trying to promote awareness of environmental protection among Japanese people.

Nice word, mottainai.