- If you love water, here are 35 ways to save it. Part 1 and Part 2, 3 & 4 to come.
- I love the idea of tattooed apples.
- How can you not love low-arsenic rice varieties from Bangladesh? Maybe because they might be opening a hornets’ nest.
- The video camera loves farmers, and the feeling’s mutual. Extension is ready for its close-up.
- It’s a short step from over-exploitation to domestication. Lovely news for …
- … Malagasy farmers, who could love their wild yams to death. Good thing they’re nuts for cultivated yams.
- Darwinian Agriculture embraces a well-argued contrary view, even though Ford doesn’t necessarily agree.
- I like the idea of an online almanac for local climate change observations, but I’d love it even more if it went global.
- The ever-contrary Matt Ridley is happy to reaffirm his love for intensive agriculture because “with cheap light, an urban, multi-story hydroponic warehouse the size of Delaware could feed the world, leaving the rest for wilderness”.
- Gene Logsdon would love to see this headline: “Monsanto retreating before invading pigweed hordes.” Dream on, Gene.
- And what would today be without chocolate? I love that things are never as simple as they seem, even in the realm of Theobroma cacao.
Nibbles: Maize genes, Livestock domestication, Guinea fowl, Plant identification, Juniper conservation, Cacao conservation, Seed talk, IPBES report, Global consultation
- Today’s genomic breakthrough involves kernel number in maize.
- Neolithic people overhunted, then thought better of it.
- Was guinea fowl ever domesticated, I wonder?
- How to figure out if you’ve looked hard enough. For plants, that is. And some discussion.
- Gin is in trouble. But help is at hand.
- A workshop on chocolate and vanilla. My kinda event. And chocolate does need help. Gin, chocolate. Pretty soon life wont be worth living.
- Simran Sethi’s Twitter chat after TEDxManhattan was storified, but it’s gone now of course. Try this instead.
- Final say on that IPBES-1 gabfest.
- And the first say on that “Global Consultation on agricultural biodiversity for sustainable food security” thing.
Brainfood: Cotton hybrids, Lentil drought phenotyping, Wild Prunus, Italian food discourse, Disturbance and diversity, Olive domestication, Rhizobium diversity, Intensification, Niche model uncertainty
- Interspecific hybridization in Gossypium L.: characterization of progenies with different ploidy-confirmed multigenomic backgrounds. They can be made, with some difficulty, and could be useful.
- A new phenotyping technique for screening for drought tolerance in lentil (Lens culinaris Medik.). In hydroponics. Seems to work.
- Polyploidy and microsatellite variation in the relict tree Prunus lusitanica L.: how effective are refugia in preserving genotypic diversity of clonal taxa? The island populations are particularly important.
- Trade-off or convergence? The role of food security in the evolution of food discourse in Italy. The food crisis had quite an impact.
- Diversity loss with persistent human disturbance increases vulnerability to ecosystem collapse. Suppression of fire in a species-rich grassland has resulted in a very low diversity but highly productive vegetation. Unfortunately, when you re-introduce fire, the whole thing collapses.
- The complex history of the olive tree: from Late Quaternary diversification of Mediterranean lineages to primary domestication in the northern Levant. Don’t forget the 3 refugia in Middle East, Aegean and Gibraltar. And, coincidentally, more.
- Isolation and characterization of salt-tolerant rhizobia native to the desert soils of United Arab Emirates. I hope someone conserves them.
- The compatibility of agricultural intensification in a global hotspot of smallholder agrobiodiversity (Bolivia). Peaches for cash didn’t do anything nasty to the diverse maize landraces. Which are in any case conserved ex situ, just to be on the safe side? Right?
- Detrital diversity influences estuarine ecosystem performance. Diverse mud makes for healthier seagrasses and mangroves.
- Conservation Planning with Uncertain Climate Change Projections. Gotta look at those sensitivities.
Brainfood: Vitamin C, Nutrition and health, European protected areas, Coffea diversity, Climate change modelling, Soil microbes, Niche modelling, Conflict, Human modified landscapes, Horse diversity, Pigeon diversity
- The challenge of increasing vitamin C content in plant foods. Surely not just because it is challenging?
- Health economics and nutrition: a review of published evidence. “[A]pproaches and methodologies are sometimes ad hoc in nature and vary widely in quality.” Ain’t that always the way.
- European protected areas: Past, present and future. The future will need to be different from the past.
- Genetic structure and diversity of coffee (Coffea) across Africa and the Indian Ocean islands revealed using microsatellites. Good correspondence with morphological species. Madagascar a diversity hotspot.
- Special Issue of Agricultural and Forest Meteorology on Agricultural prediction using climate model ensembles. There’s more than one way to identify a potential adaptation hotspot. Well that’s reassuring. Not.
- Changes in soil microbial functional diversity under different vegetation restoration patterns for Hulunbeier Sandy Land. Restoring desertified grassland led to more soil microbial diversity. Which is good because…?
- A review of composition studies of Cameroon traditional dishes: Macronutrients and minerals. 117 of them. Good for Fe, Zn, Mg.
- Essential elements of discourse for advancing the modelling of species’ current and potential distributions. There’s lots of methods, all quite different, embrace the diversity.
- Understanding and managing conservation conflicts. Build up an evidence base, and employ some social scientists to explain it.
- On the hope for biodiversity-friendly tropical landscapes. In the end, it’s about the agriculture. In more ways than one.
- Genetic Diversity in the Modern Horse Illustrated from Genome-Wide SNP Data. High maternal, low paternal during domestication. Low diversity breeds the ones you’d expect. Similar breeds the ones you’d expect.
- Genomic Diversity and Evolution of the Head Crest in the Rock Pigeon. Middle Eastern origins, Darwin vindicated. Again.
Agroforestry and conservation
A new paper out in Biodiversity and Conservation presents a review of how smallholder agroforestry contributes to the conservation of tropical tree species. ((Dawson, I., Guariguata, M., Loo, J., Weber, J., Lengkeek, A., Bush, D., Cornelius, J., Guarino, L., Kindt, R., Orwa, C., Russell, J., & Jamnadass, R. (2013). What is the relevance of smallholders’ agroforestry systems for conserving tropical tree species and genetic diversity in circa situm, in situ and ex situ settings? A review Biodiversity and Conservation, 22 (2), 301-324 DOI: 10.1007/s10531-012-0429-5)) That can seem a funny way to look at it, I admit that even as a co-author. The more obvious question might have been to ask how tree conservation efforts can contribute to smallholder agroforestry, and that has indeed been covered in another paper by some of the same authors. What we were at least partly trying to do in this paper is to make the point to the more general tropical biodiversity community that farmers and cultivated landscapes potentially have a role in conservation.
Potentially being the operative word. Because it’s not automatic. In particular, the paper highlights three areas where we need to do some more work in order to make sure that the potential is realized.
1. Although agroforestry systems can be highly diverse in tree species, this may be transitory, for example as remnant forest trees in farmland die. We need to know how to promote connectivity among low density trees in agroforestry systems in order to support conservation in farm landscapes.
2. Tree cultivation in agroforestry systems (or in plantations) may well support the conservation of nearby trees in natural forest by taking pressure off the resource base, as the conventional wisdom has it. But it may not. In fact, we know little about the link between the two, and there are reasons to think this link is often negative rather than positive for conservation.
3. Ex situ seed storage may not be much of an option for trees because of the high costs of regeneration of stored seed. Do ex situ genebanks lead to a false sense of security about what is conserved? What sorts of partnerships are necessary for genebanks to really come through?
Funnily enough, another paper just out reviews the conservation and use of a particular tropical agroforestry tree, Bactris gasipaes, or the Peach palm. ((Graefe, S., Dufour, D., Zonneveld, M., Rodriguez, F., & Gonzalez, A. (2012). Peach palm (Bactris gasipaes) in tropical Latin America: implications for biodiversity conservation, natural resource management and human nutrition Biodiversity and Conservation, 22 (2), 269-300 DOI: 10.1007/s10531-012-0402-3)) The authors recommend smaller, more carefully chosen and better characterized ex situ collections, which fits in with the third point. ((Incidentally, the paper provides a useful lists of Bactris collections, but only for the Amazon. There are others.)) But not only:
On-farm conservation could be an appropriate alternative for in situ conservation of wild populations, particularly if high levels of diversity are maintained in nearby cultivated populations and these are genetically close to wild populations (Hollingsworth et al. 2005).
As the two previous points suggest, that “could” will need to be deconstructed a bit if a truly effective conservation strategy is to emerge.
But the paper doesn’t stop there. I was particularly interested in the observations that processing and value addition are “virtually non-existent,” and that “40-50% of peach palm production never reaches the market and is either fed to farm animals or wasted.” Plenty of scope for conservation of this particular agroforestry species to contribute to smallholder systems, and perhaps vice versa.