Author: Jeremy Cherfas

People do worry about the “escape” of agricultural plants into the pristine wilderness that surrounds farmers fields. In England, smears of bright yellow follow the roads that harvesters and trucks have taken with their loads of mustard and rape seeds. The big question seems to be whether such escapees can persist in the wild. Now, in Ecological Modelling, an “exhaustive 4-year survey” in France looked at the origin of feral crops. Seed immigration from fields and from transport are important, but the single most important factor was found to be the seedbank; the number of seeds in the soil at any given time. ((PIVARD, S. (2008). Characterizing the presence of oilseed rape feral populations on field margins using machine learning. Ecological Modelling, 212;(1-2), 147-154. DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2007.10.012))

Many cultivated species, such as oilseed rape, sunflower, wheat or sorghum can escape from crops, and colonize field margins as feral populations. The general processes leading to the escape and persistence of cultivated species on field margins are still poorly investigated. An exhaustive 4-year survey was conducted in the centre of France at a landscape level to study the origin of feral oilseed rape populations. We present here results obtained with machine learning methods, which are increasingly popular techniques for analysing large ecological datasets. As expected, the dynamics of feral populations relies on large seed immigration from fields and transport. However, the seed bank was shown to be the keystone of their persistence rather than local recruitment.

Which is good to know. But of course the real reason to blog this post is to note the unfortunate paper title, involving as it does “feral rape,” and to include a link to one of my favourite non-agrobiodiversity sources, Language Log, which just happens to be dealing with some of the Brassicaceae and which has this to say:

[Further side note: rape [rep] as the name for these greens in English has an understandably unhappy history. Even rapeseed oil, for the cooking oil made from the seeds of the rape plant, is edgy — which is why we now have canola oil, made from a variety of rapeseed originally developed in Canada.]

Of course, feral canola carries no google-juice whatsoever.