- Past rapid spread of introduced livestock coincided with vegetation clearance on Madagascar. Ancient sheep, goat and cattle bones show livestock racing across the island about 1,200 years ago, in step with forest clearance and the loss of elephant birds and pygmy hippos. People had arrived long before, so hunting alone is an insufficient culprit. Also I can’t imagine pygmy hippos being all that nice to eat.
- Paleogenomic insight into the collapse, recovery, and management of American bison. 115 ancient and 45 modern genomes show that past bison populations were widely connected, which means that today’s herds, while more fragmented, retain more diversity than was feared. Also, many modern bison lack the cattle ancestry long assumed to be ubiquitous, but wood bison do carry plains bison ancestry from 1920s translocations. So, swings and roundabouts.
- Whole-genome resequencing reveals genetic diversity, population structure, and selection signatures in tibetan yak. Three recently recognised Xizang populations (Chawula, Jila and Niangya) prove genetically richer than many others and cluster with Yushu and wild yak. Selection signals turn up at coat colour genes such as MC1R and at candidates for meat production. Has anyone done selection signals in bison?
- Selection of a phenotypic and functional core set for South Korean silkworm genetic resources, Bombyx mori (Lepidoptera: Bombycidae). A core set is distilled from a larger collection on multiple morphological, physiological and quality criteria, a manageable shortlist so the genebank’s holdings can be more easily used rather than merely admired. What would a core collection for the bison look like, I wonder?
- Impact of genomic selection on genetic diversity in 5 local European cattle breeds. Genomic selection uses DNA information from across an animal’s genome to predict its breeding value, allowing breeders to select animals likely to pass desirable traits to their offspring earlier and more accurately than relying on observed characteristics or pedigree alone. But can it be bad for genetic diversity if applied to a small local breed? Well, it shortened sire generation intervals and evened out top-sire contributions, but inbreeding rose in two breeds and fell in three. Genetic management mattered more than genomic selection, so the lesson is to monitor, and adjust as needed. Possibly relevant to the bison?
- Adoption of support tools for biodiversity conservation: a mixed-methods analysis of ecosystem services awareness among Slovenian cattle farmers. Livestock farmers who are younger and with more positive attitudes to biodiversity and the European Green Deal are more likely to adopt biodiversity-supporting practices. Knowing this could have saved many pigmy hippos 1,200 years ago in Madagascar.
- A national fish pond dataset for Nigeria generated using automated detection and segmentation. A segmentation model run over imagery, with a Random Forest classifier filtering the candidates, yields an openly released map of aquaculture production that was previously hard to see, let alone manage.
- Pathways to recover Asian wild pigs from African swine fever. Since 2018 the virus has caused huge mortality in naive wild pig populations, and the authors set out eight priority actions, with early-warning surveillance, captive breeding and emergency financing the ones that can’t wait. Free-ranging domestic pigs and thin biosecurity at the wildlife-livestock interface keep kind of bring us back to where we began on Madagascar.
Weed all about it
I think I vaguely knew that USDA had a hemp collection, but I would definitely not have been able to tell you that it was located in Geneva, NY, that it may be the largest in the world, or that it only started in 2021. Fortunately, though, the researchers responsible for the collection organized a USDA Hemp Stakeholder Event at Cornell AgriTech on September 10, and the good people at the International Hemp Podcast are summarizing the proceedings in a series of four episodes. Episode 1 is out, and it includes those tidbits I began with, as well as lots of other interesting information, about hemp in particular but also more generally about how the US genebank system works. Well worth a listen.
But does USDA in fact have the largest hemp collection in the world? Well, the podcast says it has over 800 accessions, and GRIN does indeed return 871 (714 active, 92 available) hits. However, Genesys, which gets its USDA data from GRIN, says 569, which is at least closer to the “N > 600 accessions” on the webpage of the USDA Hemp Germplasm Laboratory. As it’s a fairly new collection, this all probably just means that its numbers go up fairly frequently and USDA just hasn’t updated either its website or its data on Genesys lately. Anyway, that would still give it more accessions than at VIR (491), though fewer than in Ukraine (610). That Ukraine number is split over two institutes, however. So it does look like USDA has managed to put together the world’s largest hemp collection in just 5 years. Pretty impressive. Too bad the podcast doesn’t go into how they did it.
Give farmers room to grow
Farmers conserve and improve the crop diversity around them. They have been doing it for millennia. Their livelihoods depend on it. But how much more might they be able to do?
Consider the coconut. Farmers know which palms have characteristics they value, but with ordinary open pollination they can choose the mother but not the father of future coconuts. A recent paper proposes relatively simple techniques that would allow farmers to control pollination and thus choose both parents and produce more predictable seednuts. It won’t turn them into breeders, but it could help them produce — and maybe even sell — better planting material.
Tamarind presents a different version of the same problem. Much of the African crop still comes from scattered, semi-wild trees. Harvesters know which trees are best, but turning a particularly good tree into a reliable source of planting material is hard. Seedlings don’t necessarily reproduce the parent’s characteristics, and tamarind takes years to mature. Grafting and other forms of vegetative propagation exist, but have not been widely adopted, according to a recent review.
There’s a nice example from southern Africa that gives a glimpse of what might be. Researchers are identifying exceptionally productive wild fruit trees in the miombo woodlands and cloning them through grafting and air-layering. A tree that might otherwise take around a dozen years to fruit can produce within four or five when propagated this way.
But it doesn’t have to be a researcher doing that. A farmer or harvester who knows a particularly productive tree, or one with especially good fruit, could propagate it through cloning rather than relying on whatever seedlings happen to arise.
Coconut and tamarind aren’t the same, and neither are the technologies needed. But the principle is similar. We sometimes fall into the error of thinking that conserving and improving crop diversity are things done for farmers, whether in a genebank, a breeding programme or a research station. But they already do these things. Sometimes they just need a little room to try doing them a little bit differently.
Nibbles: Bacon kitchen garden, Bison diversity, African herbaria, Mycorrhiza, China wild rice genebank, African seed laws
- Sir Nathaniel Bacon’s painting records the arrival of American crops in early modern England. And the cookmaid gets equal billing.
- North America’s bison survived near-extinction, but how much of its genetic diversity is left? Past and present DNA is helping reconstruct what was lost, with implications for how what remains is conserved and managed.
- China’s wild rice collection in Hainan now holds more than 15,000 samples. A genetic treasure trove, but its value ultimately depends on what breeders can make of it. Much like what’s left of bison diversity.
- Mycorrhizal fungi form vast underground networks that support plant life and store carbon. A new global map begins to show their extent, and just how much of this biodiversity remains overlooked.
- Africa’s herbaria hold centuries of botanical history, much of it still effectively invisible. Specimens can reveal shifting plant distributions and overlooked species. First, though, someone has to do the painstaking work of getting the data online.
- Africa has done painstaking work on seed laws, but getting good seed to farmers remains hard in practice. The gap between policy and delivery is stark, and commercial companies need to work alongside farmer-managed seed systems, not pretend they don’t exist.
Good news from Beltsville?
After the recent worrying announcement about the USDA closing the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center, there may now be some good news. US Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins has just announced a $180 million Seed Sovereignty Initiative to genotype collections of “major crops” in the National Plant Germplasm System, which holds more than 600,000 accessions of over 16,000 species. The two-year programme aims to reveal useful traits, identify gaps in the collections, and accelerate the development of new varieties. That’s a substantial investment in resources that are all too often taken for granted.
But the language is worth a closer look. This is framed as a matter of seed sovereignty and national security: the United States must not depend on “foreign adversaries” for its agricultural production, while foreign competitors are busy sequencing genetic resources. The emphasis is on turning America’s crop diversity collections, which are in the Multilateral System of the Plant Treaty, into a strategic national asset, and giving American farmers a competitive advantage.
None of that makes the investment unwelcome. Better genetic characterization could benefit researchers and breeders well beyond the United States, provided the resulting information is accessible. And understanding what genebanks hold, and what remains missing, is precisely the sort of work that should have been a priority all along.
Still, there is a difference between recognizing the strategic importance of crop diversity and treating it as a weapon in geopolitical competition. Will this initiative strengthen the shared knowledge base on which global crop improvement depends, or will national advantage determine what gets studied, shared and used? The $180 million investment is good news. The rhetoric, and the priorities it may signal, deserve rather more scrutiny.