- Maharashtra to set up a genebank, but definitely NOT the nation’s first.
- Meanwhile, in Kashmir…
- Let them eat cassava cake.
- Minor roots and tubers not so minor in Malawi. Cassava unavailable for comment.
- Area man shares heirloom tomatoes. Not many people hurt.
- How to make the most, sustainably, of 12 wild-harvested plant species. According to FAO.
- Indigenous peoples have been harvesting oysters sustainably for millennia.
- The wonderful Plant Humanities Initiative does recipes.
Nibbles: Diversification, Heirloom greens, Forgotten fruit, Eat this meat, SPC lab
- We need to diversify the food system.
- Start with collard greens maybe?
- Continue with pawpaws.
- And do something about meat.
- Finally, open a molecular lab.
- Wait, what?
How diverse can croplands be?
A guest post from Fernando Aramburu Merlos on his recent paper with friend-of-the-blog Robert Hijmans.
Four species (wheat, rice, maize, and soybean) occupy half the world’s croplands. It has been argued that this means we cannot increase crop species diversity much without changing what we eat ((Renard, D. & Tilman, D. Cultivate biodiversity to harvest food security and sustainability. Curr. Biol. 31, R1154–R1158 (2021) )). Radically shifting our diets is a tall order, not just because changing habits is a challenge but also because we are so good at growing and processing the major crops. It’s an unfair race in which the major crops have a head start of millions of dollars and research hours.
We wanted to know how much crop diversity can be increased without changing the global food supply ((Aramburu Merlos, F. & Hijmans, R. J. Potential, attainable, and current levels of global crop diversity. Environ. Res. Lett. 17, 044071 (2022) )). So we estimated the attainable crop diversity, which is the highest level of crop species diversity you can get without changing the total production of each crop. To compute this, we “shuffled the cards and dealt again”: over 100 crops were distributed across the worlds’ existing croplands by allocating each to the most suitable land while considering the inter-specific competition for land.
It turned out that tropical and coastal regions can reach much higher levels of diversity than temperate and continental areas. Perhaps that is not especially surprising, but one implication is that we should not assume that all countries can achieve the same maximum levels of crop diversity ((This assumption was made for the agrobiodiversity index proposed by Jones, S. K. et al. Nat. Food 2, 712–723 (2021))). We also noted that attainable diversity cannot explain current diversity patterns very well. For example, the diversity gap, the difference between the current and the attainable diversity, is much higher in the Americas than in Europe and East Asia.
Diversity gaps, expressed as a percentage of the attainable diversity, are greater than 50% in 85% of the world’s croplands. Thus, in principle, crop diversity could double in the vast majority of the world without changing our heavy reliance on a few staple crops. So there must be strong forces at work that make farmers and regions specialize. For example, at the farm level, a high crop diversity may be difficult to manage, reduce economies of scale, and be costly if it comes at the expense of the most profitable crops.
It would be interesting to better understand what specific factors limit diversification in the regions with the largest crop diversity gaps, and how to reduce them. But more important questions need to be answered first. How much diversity is enough diversity? And is that the same for all regions? Some very low diversity systems appear to be highly sustainable (the flooded rice systems in Asia come to mind). A more spatially explicit and species-specific, functional understanding of the effect of diversity at the field scale would be helpful. Without that, diversity gaps are just an interesting emergent property of specialization, but not something that necessarily must be reduced.
Nibbles: American single malt, Gauguin’s coconut, World Seed Congress, Red gold, Kunming
- Will American single malt whiskey be a thing? Depends on the American barley.
- Is the fruit in Paul Gauguin’s Eü haere ia oe (Woman Holding a Fruit) a coconut? Have your say.
- Will the World Seed Congress sow a brilliant future? We shall see.
- Is the oil palm over in West Africa? Depends.
- Where are we with that post-2020 biodiversity deal? Nowhere much yet.
Brainfood: NPGS use, Descriptor clustering, Fast phenotyping, Flax duplicates, Photosynthesis variation, Brassica breeding, Robusta & CC, Seaweed domestication, Fighting fish domestication, Hotspots & diets, Cotton & wildlife
- Developing country demand for crop germplasm conserved by the U.S. National Plant Germplasm System. 5 years, 10 crops, 100,000 samples.
- cacGMS: An Algorithm Cluster Germplasm based on Categorical Genetic Traits. Build a better cluster algorithm for categorical descriptors and the world will beat a path to your genebank. If it isn’t already.
- Deep learning: as the new frontier in high-throughput plant phenotyping. A really fancy way of scoring those descriptors.
- Selection of duplicates of flax accessions – an important task in the management of collection of genetic resources of Linum usitatissimum L. But you can do a lot with passport data.
- Mining for allelic gold: finding genetic variation in photosynthetic traits in crops and wild relatives. Let the gene editing begin!
- Expanding the genetic variation of Brassica juncea by introgression of the Brassica rapa genome. AABB gets a shot of AA.
- Adaptive potential of Coffea canephora from Uganda in response to climate change. Some populations are going to do better than others under climate change. Ah, but are they the best populations for other traits?
- Pre-domestication bottlenecks of the cultivated seaweed Gracilaria chilensis. Founder effect and over-exploitation mean that more diversity from New Zealand might be needed.
- Genomic consequences of domestication of the Siamese fighting fish. You don’t need huge genetic diversity to get huge phenotypic diversity, even with strong selection. But will new diversity be needed eventually? From Siam?
- Food versus wildlife: Will biodiversity hotspots benefit from healthier diets? Some hotspots will actually do worse if people eat better, so we will have to look at better agriculture too. Including seaweed, for all I know.
- Commodity crops in biodiversity-rich production landscapes: Friends or foes? The example of cotton in the Mid Zambezi Valley, Zimbabwe. Possibly an example of the above. Cotton was better for wildlife than what came after prices dropped.