Two of the newly-inscribed sites in the UNESCO World Heritage List caught my eye because of their agricultural biodiversity connections: both, interestingly, are in Europe. The first is the Lavaux vineyard terraces, 30 km of 1000-year-old agricultural landscape around Lake Geneva. The second is the primeval beech forest of the Carpathians, in Slovakia and Ukraine. However, I must admit that this second one only caught me eye by mistake, as it were. I thought it was in these forests that the last aurochs lived, but that was ignorance, pure ignorance on my part. It is the wisent that lives there, still. The last recorded aurochs died in 1627 in the royal forest of Jaktorow in Masovia, central Poland. Somewhere else entirely. But I wonder if there are any other wild relatives — of either livestock or crops — in the primeval Carpathian beech forest.
Bamboo galore
The latest issue of FAO’s NWFP-Digest seems to be joining in with the celebrations of the 10th birthday of the International Network for Bamboo and Rattan (INBAR). In addition to the International Bamboo & Rattan Expo in Guangzhou, China (see map), it points to a new technique from India for rapid bamboo propagation, the manufacture of bamboo bicycles in Ghana, the sale of bamboo socks in the UK and the planting of bamboo in Bhutan. There’s lots of other stuff too, though.
Rescuing the American chestnut
You know, these Nibbles (the short, soundbite-type things which appear at the top of the right sidebar of this page) are fun to do, but sometimes you end up downplaying, or over-simplifying, an important, interesting — and interestingly complex — story. Take what I said about the American chestnut a few days ago. The recent history of Castanea dentata is proud and tragic 1, and efforts to bring it back from the brink of annihilation well-nigh heroic. To imply, as I did, that these efforts were confined to hybridizing the American with the Chinese chestnut was justified only by the necessity for extreme brevity. In fact, of course, it is not just hybridization but repeated back-crossing. And not just interspecific crossing but also painstaking crossing among the few remaining pure American chestnuts, as reported in the article that prompted me to revisit the original story and hopefully make amends for my earlier flippancy.
Restoring the American chestnut
A grant allows American chestnuts to survive, as hybrids with the Chinese species.
Biodiversity even more valuable
A study published in tomorrow’s Nature (news item) suggests that previous estimates of the value of biodiversity in supplying ecosystem services may have consistently underestimated its importance. This is because previous efforts looked at single services, such as clean water or pollination. Professor Andy Hector from the University of Zurich, Switzerland and Dr Robert Bagchi from the University of Oxford developed a new method to look at multiple ecosystem processes in the same analysis. According to Professor Hector “previous analyses have been too narrowly focused … and have effectively assumed that the species that are important for one ecosystem service can provide all the other services too – but that doesn’t seem to be the case”.
Applying their method to data from European grasslands, Hector and Bagchi found that higher levels of biodiversity were required when all seven of the measured ecosystem services were taken into account than when focusing on any single ecosystem service in isolation. Moreover, different ecosystem services were affected by different groups of species. Dr Bagchi explained that “because different species influence different ecosystem services more species are required for a fully-functioning ecosystem than for one managed with a single goal in mind”.
What’s really neat is that the researchers are now testing their ideas in the tropics. Professor Hector is one of the lead researchers on the Sabah Biodiversity Experiment in Malaysian Borneo, which investigates whether tree-replanting schemes are more successful in restoring fully-functioning forest ecosystems when they use a high diversity of species than the monocultures that are usually planted. That’ll be one to watch.