Author: Robert Hijmans

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Great Expectations

Nature has a (behind paywall) feature on Five crop researchers who could change the world. Rather than celebrating those who have arrived, Emma Marris highlights the work of five researchers who still have some way to go before reaching the Food Hall of Fame.

These are her picks.

Peter Dodds (CSIRO, Australia) works on the fundamentals of wheat stem rust. He investigates the substances that the rust fungus excretes, and the plant could use to trigger a defense reaction. He hopes to engineer new and more complex resistance, that the rust might not be able to break. Seems particularly relevant in the light of the UG99 scare.

Jerry Glover is a crop perennializer at the Land Institute, in Kansas, USA. The folks at the Land Institute want us to move from annual to perennial crops. That would be better for the soil and would take much less energy (nitrogen) to produce. They are clearly in it for the long run, but here’s a short and palatable piece about it.

Zhang Jinghua (Hong Kong Baptist University) works on deficit irrigation. The theory is that under modest water stress plants shift all their resources to reproduction and hence grain yield can increase. One trick in his book, and that of Australian grape growers, is ‘partial root zone drying’. Some roots are dry, and signal the need to fill the seeds, while other roots can access the water that is needed to keep producing. Water saving is particularly important in increasingly water scarce Northern China.

Richard Sayre, the director of the Institute for Renewable Fuels, Missouri, USA, was selected because he heads the BioCassava Plus collaboration. They are hoping to develop genetically modified cassava of which 500 g contains the daily requirements of protein, vitamin A and E, iron and zinc ((What will be left to do? Fluorescence to lighten up the nights, and the ability to use the root as cell phone battery?)). They have succeeded in transformations for individual traits, now they have to figure out how to artificially transfer 15 genes into a single variety.

Julian Hibberd (U. of Cambridge) studies photosynthesis. He is one of the brains in the C4 rice consortium led by IRRI. They are trying to create rice plants with C4 rather than C3 photosynthesis. C4 photosynthesis is more efficient at high temperature, and it could be the next big thing (after short straw) to radically elevate rice yield potential — “by a whopping 50%” ((Will they also re-engineer the straw so that it can carry all that grain?)), thinks Hibberd. Seems far fetched, but C4-ness has independently evolved in many plant families, so why not another time, with a little help?

An interesting group, but did Nature miss anyone? Perhaps in branches of research less dominated by biotech? Let us know.

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Darwin in London

By Jacob van Etten

As the anniversaries of Darwin’s birth year (1809) and his Origin of Species (published in 1859) approach, London’s Natural History Museum has an exhibition on the great man. It takes you through his life and discoveries, paying equal attention to biography and biology. The exhibition opens with two mockingbird specimens, explaining their role in Darwin’s discovery of evolution. The famous finches are there, too, but apparently they played a less important role in the formation of Darwin’s theory. The most impressive part, I found, were the original letters exhibited, including a famous letter from his wife Emma, about religion, at the bottom of which Charles noted that he had cried about it for hours. The exhibition closes with a section on past and present responses to evolution theory.

Of course, I expected some stuff on agrobiodiversity. Darwin wrote a two-volume book on it, after all, The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication. Darwin used variation in domesticated animals and plants as a model for what happens in the wild. I wasn’t disappointed. The exhibition mentions dogs, horses and cabbages. It shows specimens of all the races of pigeons Darwin kept around Down House. Knowing Darwin’s hair style, I was surprised to learn that his London barber was an important source of information on domesticated biodiversity.

I’m not the only one who liked the exhibition. The lady at the bookshop said that the responses thus far had been very positive. It is on until 19 April 2009.

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Onion tears

A Kiwi researcher laments that regulations make it pointless to work on GMO’s in New Zealand. He mentions a particular sad case in point: the obstacles to testing tearless onions. There is no reference to this in the trade-journal for this type of news, the Onion ((Compensated by their coverage of the new DNA test to reveal who is bald)). What to say? Perhaps there is nothing wrong with making onions tearless, but I feel it would be a loss. Not having rational objections, I search for a metaphysical answer. Something like Carlos Drummond de Andrade’s poem about an opposite case:

Mal do Século

Como se não bastasse o mundo de tristezas
entre céu e terra,
principalmente em terra,
vem o agrónomo, descobre
o vírus da tristeza nas laranjeiras.

My translation:

Times of Sorrow

As if there wasn’t enough sadness
between heaven and earth
particularly on earth
comes the agronomist, discovers
the sadness virus in the orange trees

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Adaptation for tropical forests, tropical forests for adaptation

“Climate change could have a devastating effect on the world’s forests and the nearly 1 billion people who depend on them for their livelihoods” ((That many? I think that they count anyone who uses a tree as part of their livelihood as someone dependent on forests. They might as well say that we all depend on forests, which we do.)) says the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) in a press release about a new report.

Unless immediate action is taken.

CIFOR proposes helping forests adapt by taking measures such as improving fire management; using plantation species that can cope with future climate; and helping forests evolve with changing climate rather than resist it. Forests can help us adapt — reduce the vulnerability of society to climate change — by assuring the flow of ecosystem services.

There should be help for the people who are managing, living in or conserving forests to adapt to future changes:

“The people living in forests are highly dependent on forest goods and services and are often very vulnerable socioeconomically,” says Bruno Locatelli, a CIFOR scientist and lead author of the report. “They usually have a much more intimate understanding of their forests than anyone else, but the unprecedented rates of climate change will almost certainly jeopardise their ability to adapt to new conditions. They will need help.”

Helping the people who know best seems an interesting contradiction and I wondered how they were proposing to go about that. Participatory approaches, it seems. I could not find that much about it in the report, which focuses on process and policy. Take this excerpt from Box 11 on “The role of science in coordinating and supporting adaptive processes in West Africa” (by Houria Djoudi, Hermann Kambire and Maria Brockhaus).

A workshop on local governance, forests and adaptive capacities in a municipality in southwest Burkina Faso, with actors from different scales, established a platform for shared knowledge and learning on forests and adaptation to climate change. Efforts to contribute to vertical coordination of adaptation, as well as support for local governance and horizontal coordination in decision making processes related to climate change adaptation and forests, are ongoing.

CIFOR also has an interesting little report on reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD).

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The need for diverse street trees

City planners take note:

Tree diversity helps prevent pests from gaining a foothold, said Mike Bohne, forest health group leader for the United States Forest Service. It also makes it so that a community does not lose its entire urban canopy if there is an infestation.

Too late for Worcester, Massachusetts (USA), where 80% of the street trees are maples. Most of them are infested by the Asian long-horned beetle and need to be removed. Property values may plummet further.

The beetle was introduced to the USA with wood packing material from China. Eradication efforts are intense as much larger economic damage is looming. Worcester is in New England and the invasive beetle might now spread to the famed maple forests that produce large quantities of syrup, wood, and leaf-peeping tourists.