- Australian politicians promise genebank. World holds its breath.
- Meanwhile, in Turkey…
- … and India…
- …and Peru…
- …and China.
- Another way of getting seeds to farmers.
- What, even irradiated ones?
- But don’t forget the bees.
- Hopefully DIS won’t scupper all this sharing.
- Because although our foods are not set in stone…
- …we’ll need more than changes in habits to adapt agriculture to climate change.
All maize, all the time
Thanks to Jay Bost for alerting us to a whole bunch of forthcoming maize talks. The first is by Dr Helen Anne Curry today, who will use her book…
…Endangered Maize, to discuss the history of efforts to conserve crop diversity from the turn of the twentieth century until today. Focusing especially on the case of maize, she will highlight the stories about agricultural change that have motivated scientists and states to save threatened varieties—and raise questions about the agendas ultimately served by these stories.
The others start next month:
The National Agricultural Library is hosting a three-part webinar series that will highlight global food staples and the intersections of global cuisines with USDA research, social sciences, and history. The series will focus on maize and corn and its past, present, and future role in food, culture, and society. Key areas of focus for the series will be sustainability, environmental justice, social justice, and nutrition security.
Brainfood: Organic ag, Food systems, Seed systems, Breeding for value, Breeding for intercropping, Breeding for cider, Breeding with CWR, Breeding with imaging, Breeding with modelling, Ag & the state
- Impact of large-scale, government legislated and funded organic farming training on pesticide use in Andhra Pradesh, India: a cross-sectional study. Training was not enough.
- Australian local government policies on creating a healthy, sustainable, and equitable food system: analysis in New South Wales and Victoria. Local governments are not doing enough.
- Impact of seed system interventions on food and nutrition security in low- and middle-income countries: A scoping review. Seems like Indian organic farming and Australian local governments should have tried seed system interventions.
- Market Intelligence and Incentive-Based Trait Ranking for Plant Breeding: A Sweetpotato Pilot in Uganda. Breeders need to figure out what farmers value.
- Plant Breeding for Intercropping in Temperate Field Crop Systems: A Review. Breeders need to look at context.
- Meta-analysis of apple (Malus × domestica Borkh.) fruit and juice quality traits for potential use in hard cider production. Breeders need to watch out for plasticity.
- Progenitor species hold untapped diversity for potential climate-responsive traits for use in wheat breeding and crop improvement. Breeders need to sequence crop wild relatives.
- The Use of Near-Infrared Imaging (NIR) as a Fast Non-Destructive Screening Tool to Identify Drought-Tolerant Wheat Genotypes. Breeders need fancy phenotyping.
- Coupling genetic structure analysis and ecological-niche modeling in Kersting’s groundnut in West Africa. Breeders need ecological niche modelling.
- The Origin of the State: Land Productivity or Appropriability? The state didn’t need breeders.
Cowpea makes the world go round
Thanks to Kai Sonder for this beautiful video of cowpea cultivation around the world.
Here’s genebank accessions in Genesys for comparison.
The limits of protected areas
There’s an interesting paper just out in Nature entitled “Protected areas have a mixed impact on waterbirds, but management helps.” It’s unfortunately behind a paywall, but one of the authors, Dr Julia Jones, has done a helpful Twitter thread about it, which I’ve unspooled here if you dislike social media. There’s also mainstream media coverage, of course.
Do protected areas effectively conserve species populations? Our paper out today in @Nature tries to answer this really important question.https://t.co/XFzLS5Iqmr
— Julia Jones (@juliapgjones) April 20, 2022
The authors analysed data on waterbird populations before and after protection of sites, mainly in North America and Europe, as collected by thousands of volunteers. They found a mixed and confusing picture, with designation of a protected area having a wide range of impacts from negative to positive on the population sizes of the birds found therein.
Disappointing, I know, but there was a ray of light. As the title of the paper says, management made a difference. If the protected area was specifically managed with waterbirds in mind, then the impact of protection was more likely to be positive.
Which is why some of us who are interested in the conservation of things other than birds think there should be a global network of protected sites for crop wild relatives (CWR). In the same way that we just can’t rely on the generalised protection afforded by legal designation of a national park, or whatever, to do anything for waterbirds, we can’t expect it a priori to do anything for CWR either.
But does that mean that we’ll need millions of protected areas around the world, each specialising only in this or that species or group of species? I don’t think so. What we do need is for the CWR conservation community to work closely with the managers of existing protected areas to make sure that the correct interventions are applied to make sure that the CWR populations which happen to occur within their borders are able to thrive. That would probably not be enough, and it may well be necessary to set up some additional protected areas specifically devoted to CWR. But it would be a good start. And we do have a good a good evidence base. 1
Incidentally, some of authors of the waterbirds paper have another paper out, “Language barriers in global bird conservation,” which is also well worth reading. About 15% of the more than 10,000 birds they looked at have geographic distributions within which more than 10 languages are spoken. And even when you control for area, threatened birds have significantly more languages spoken within their distributions. Which clearly is a challenge for conservation. I wonder if there’s something similar happening with CWR.