- The future is community seedbanks.
- The past was crop mixtures. Among other things: two-year-old reviews of books on 18th century agriculture re-upped.
- The future is trees. But they need help, hence these resources.
- Australia looks to native tree seeds for its future. No help needed.
- There will probably be a crop pandemic in the future. There have certainly been ones in the past. Even the recent past. Though plant pathogens do have their uses.
- Turkish government seizes seized seeds from the past.
- The future of swimming camels is uncertain.
Brainfood: Dietary diversity, Farm diversity double, Neolithic dairy, Exotic breeds, Yam viruses, Cassava GWAS, Satellite phenotyping, Forest restoration & disturbance, Genetic rescue, Budwood cryo, SP cryo, Dry grasslands, Botanical gardens, Remote sensing
- Agricultural Food Production Diversity and Dietary Diversity among Female Small Holder Farmers in a Region of the Ecuadorian Andes Experiencing Nutrition Transition. Higher diversity of crops on family farms is only weakly associated with greater dietary diversity and lower household food insecurity among female caretakers. Better than nothing, though, right?
- Productive Capacity of Biodiversity: Crop Diversity and Permanent Grasslands in Northwestern France. Having a bigger percentage of permanent grassland on your French farm, or a greater diversity of crops, can increase cereal and milk yields. No word on diets.
- The influence of landscape composition and configuration on crop yield resilience. No effect on yield per se (see above), but proximity to semi-natural habitat does increase yield stability in UK farms.
- Living off the land: Terrestrial-based diet and dairying in the farming communities of the Neolithic Balkans. Ancient farmers had a varied diet, but possibly not involving consumption of raw milk, at least by adults.
- Food securers or invasive aliens? Trends and consequences of non-native livestock introgression in developing countries. In 40 countries, the proportion of livestock populations belonging to local breeds has been decreasing by about 1% a year for the past 20 years. Hey, but milk yield per cow has been going up, so there’s that.
- Potentials of Cultivated Varieties and Wild Yam Seeds as Efficient Alternative Plant Genetic Resources for Resistant Genotypes against Yam Mosaic Virus (YMV) in Togo. Work with seeds! But were they properly inoculated? Hopefully a virologist will tell us.
- Genome-wide association analysis reveals new insights into the genetic architecture of defensive, agro-morphological and quality-related traits in cassava. Lots of interesting markers for cassava breeders, or at least those working with material from W Africa. Do it for yams next?
- High-resolution satellite imagery applications in crop phenotyping: An overview. Clouds, you say? Not a problem any more. But can it distinguish landraces from modern varieties? What’s needed is a sort of mutant algorithm, I guess.
- Crop type identification and spatial mapping using Sentinel-2 satellite data with focus on field-level information. Still some way from being able to distinguish landraces from modern varieties, I see.
- Global forest restoration and the importance of prioritizing local communities. I’m shocked I tell you, shocked.
- Protection gaps and restoration opportunities for primary forests in Europe. A lot of restoration could usefully be done in currently protected areas, though it would be better if these were expanded. No word on local communities.
- Mapping the forest disturbance regimes of Europe. I guess this means that restoration, when it happens, will be monitored from space.
- Genetic rescue: A critique of the evidence supports maximizing genetic diversity rather than minimizing the introduction of putatively harmful genetic variation. When you do do restoration, don’t worry about genetic pollution, just go for as much diversity as possible. Well, for small relict populations. Of animals.
- Considerations for large-scale implementation of dormant budwood cryopreservation. It’s about the logistics.
- Development of a fast and user-friendly cryopreservation protocol for sweet potato genetic resources. It’s the axillary meristems. Among other things.
- The human–environment nexus and vegetation–rainfall sensitivity in tropical drylands. Dryland grasslands in Africa and Asia less able to respond to water availability overall, more able in Australia and S America, evens stevens in N America. Would be interesting to mash up particularly hard-hit areas with CWR and forage germplasm collecting localities.
- Botanic garden solutions to the plant extinction crisis. Expertise, tools, facilities, and networks are there. You know what’s missing, right?
Mapping crop species diversity in space and time
A big thank you to Fernando Aramburu Merlos, one of the authors of a very interesting recent paper on crop rotation in the USA, for contributing this nice blog post describing his findings.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, a good map is worth a million. Or, at least, that is how it felt after spending many hours staring at CropScape and mapping crop rotations – that is, the sequence in which different crop species are planted in a field – across the United States.
The USDA CropScape database is amazing: it identifies the crop planted for 30m grid cells across all the contiguous United States for the last 10+ years. It is a unique resource to better understand crop species diversity patterns for an entire, large country, and that is what we set out to do. “Let’s download the data and see what we can do,” said my advisor Robert Hijmans some time ago. But having a lot of data can also be overwhelming, and questions abounded. How should we estimate diversity? At what scale? And in what dimension: time or space, or both? In the end, much of the analysis focused on how temporal and spatial diversity are connected.
As an agronomist by training, it astonished me how little was available on spatial patterns in temporal diversity. For so many hours I have had to listen to lectures and read about the benefits of crop rotations, but I could not find a single crop rotation diversity map. One reason is surely that you need high spatial resolution crop distribution data for that, which is not available for most countries. So I was thrilled to create the first crop rotation diversity map for the US. I still can’t stop looking at it. Here it is.
The map, and the article that discussed it, has just been published. 1 It shows (to no one’s surprise) that temporal crop species diversity in time is very low in most of the USA. The national average is 2.1 crops, with 86% of the cropland with 3 or fewer crops in rotation. We also found that the greater the popularity 2 of an annual crop, the less diverse is the rotation it is grown in. We proposed various reasons for that, but the take-home message is that “to increase crop species diversity, currently minor crops would have to increase in area at the expense of these major crops.” We would need less maize, soybeans and wheat to make space for other crops (to get back to the peak-diversity of the 1960s).
The scale issue was the hardest to tackle, and it is not just a purely academic concern. A number of recent papers use country level crop diversity data to explain food production stability and pollination . Our analysis suggest that while these country level analyses may be of interest, it is important to note that national level diversity is not directly related to farm level diversity, as many authors seem to assume.
So do read our paper if any of this interests you. And if it does not, you can still simply enjoy the maps.
How to sample for ex situ conservation
There was an intriguing tweet a few days ago from the redoubtable Sean Hoban about a presentation his lab is making at the Center for Plant Conservation meeting this week.
The @seanmhoban lab will present this poster at @CPCplants conference this week. Work by @Kaylee_rosen @koticneutralDNA @BailieMunoz building on vital work by @BethanyZumwalde @ScientistESS pic.twitter.com/SMfX3Qe4oM
— Sean Hoban (@seanmhoban) October 4, 2020
I was particularly taken with this bit.
Sampling more from bigger populations is somewhat different advice than has been given in the past, and it will be interesting to see the reaction.
The two references that Sean lists on the poster are as follows:
- Toward the metacollection: Coordinating conservation collections to safeguard plant diversity.
- Conservation through collaboration: Ensuring genetic diversity in garden collections.
Nibbles: Crop mapping, Sampling, Rice domestication, Coffee rust podcast, Wool dogs
- Crop-Climate Suitability Mapping. Yes, another one. I feel a proper post coming on.
- Tweet from Sean Hoban on ex situ sampling strategies. I feel a proper post coming on.
- Proper blog post explains a really complicated rice domestication paper in about a page.
- Proper podcast from Jeremy on, among other things, why coffee leaf rust is not why the Brits drink tea.
- Not sure if this is blog post, but it’s a really good example of weaving together (see what I did there?) different pieces of work on the wool dogs (sic) of the Pacific NW.