After Victor Mulinge’s valuable comment on planting mango trees, news of a project designed to help poor people to develop small and medium forest enterprises. It has only just begun, so don’t expect much yet in the way of results. But there is some interesting information and contacts at the project announcement page.
Drought resistance
A couple of very different stories about drought resistance in the media today. The first one describes – albeit very briefly – how Italian breeders have come up with a new tomato variety that needs about a quarter of the water of thirstier types. It’s not clear from the article, but I got the impression genetic modification was involved, which would be odd as some wild tomato species are found in deserts! So I did a bit of snooping on the website of ENEA, the institute where the research was done, and I found a press release from a few days back which suggests (in Italian) that perhaps it was not genetic transformation but rather functional genomics that was involved. The second piece tells us how a combination of experimental and observational work by Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute scientists in Panama is suggesting that even in the humid tropics it is drought which is limiting the distribution of many species. As climate change is expected to manifest itself primarily though shifts in rainfall patterns in the tropics, this means that dramatic changes are likely in the composition of plant communities in Central America.
Chinese fungi and tea
I’m killing a few hours at Hong Kong International Airport, so I pick up the latest issue of China Today. There’s a number of really interesting articles, but two little snippets jumped out at me. The first is a short note on the Chinese Caterpillar Fungus, Cordyceps sinensis. No, I’d never heard of it either, but it turns out that it is important in Chinese traditional medicine, and that it has not been possible to grow it in the lab. Until just now that is, hence the note in the Sci-tech Info section announcing the possibility of mass-production.
The other really nifty piece of sino-information occurs in the opening section of an Around China piece on the Zhenyuan Yi-Hani-Lanu Autonomous County. It seems that this ancient tea-growing area, with its tea-dominated forests, boasts what is considered the oldest and largest tea plant in the world. At 25 metres tall, almost 3 metres in diameter and an alleged 2,700 years of age, it is apparently quite the tourist attraction, and “its fleshy, glossy leaves produce a strong and lasting flavour.”
Magnolias in trouble
The Global Trees Campaign says that 131 of 245 wild Magnoliaceae are threatened worldwide. According to this press release from BGCI:
The significance of this potentially catastrophic loss lies not only in the threat to the genetic diversity of the family, but also because they are a highly sensitive indicator of the well-being of the forests in which they are found. Magnolias are among the most ancient groups of flowering plants and have long been cultivated by mankind.
You can download a PDF of the new Magnoliaceae Red List. The publication of the red list has been widely covered by the press, including New Scientist. Many species have medicinal uses and some are used for food.
Predictably, protected areas are highlighted as an important approach to the conservation of these species, particularly in their hotspot in southern China. A separate new study
concludes that protected areas are necessary for preventing the loss of species due to climate change – provided that shifts in species’ ranges are factored into early analysis of whether to expand current protected areas or create new ones.
The new red list includes distribution maps of all magnolias, clearly an important first step.
Farming in the rainforest can preserve biodiversity
Mongabay writes about a newly published study of cacao farming in Indonesia. The bottom line seems to be that while clearing the forest is more profitable, at least short term, growing cacao under a thinned canopy maintains the diversity of wild species and reduces environmental impacts. But some economic incentive may be needed to promote this option over clear-felling. That option, they note, could be premium priced shade-grown chocolate, just like premium coffee.