- Conserving and Sharing Taro Genetic Resources for the Benefit of Global Taro Cultivation: A Core Contribution of the Centre for Pacific Crops and Trees. The first line of defence against Taro Leaf Blight, among other things.
- Female access to fertile land and other inputs in Zambia: why women get lower yields. Because they’re stuck with the poorer soils. I’m assuming there was some control for maize variety, but the damn thing is behind a paywall. LATER: Yeah, they controlled for hybrid vs open pollinated variety.
- Towards a dialogue of sustainable agriculture and end-times theology in the United States: insights from the historical ecology of nineteenth century millennial communes. In other news, it has become necessary to reconcile the apocalypse with sustainability.
- Population genomic analyses of the chocolate tree, Theobroma cacao L., provide insights into its domestication process. Domestication was both good and bad.
- The use and domestication of Theobroma cacao during the mid-Holocene in the upper Amazon. Archaeology says domestication in western Amazon in line with above (somewhere in Ecuador?), but earlier than thought.
- DNA methylation footprints during soybean domestication and improvement. Differentially methylated regions are particularly genetically diverse.
- Major domestication-related phenotypes in indica rice are due to loss of miRNA-mediated laccase silencing. Not so much the genes, as their regulation.
- Phylogenetic patterns and phenotypic profiles of the species of plants and mammals farmed for food. Plants and animals are different.
- Botanic Gardens Complement Agricultural Gene Bank in Collecting and Conserving Plant Genetic Diversity. 6000 taxa in 68 crop genera are in botanic gardens. Check out the rest of the special edition of Biopreservation and Biobanking on agricultural genebanks.
- Plants: Crop diversity pre‐breeding technologies as agrarian care co‐opted? Pre-breeding ignores farmers’ knowledge.
- The Open Source Seed Licence: A novel approach to safeguarding access to plant germplasm. Seeds will find a way.
- When too much isn’t enough: Does current food production meet global nutritional needs? No: grow more food and vegetables.
- Breeding and genomics status in faba bean (Vicia faba). Plenty of diversity to be still used. Pass the chianti.
- QTL Mapping of Resistance to Bean Weevil in Common Bean. Based on a cross between the susceptible Zambian landrace Solwezi and the resistant breeding line AO-1012-29-3-3A. But which Solwezi? I hope there’s a DOI in the actual paper for those who get through the paywall.
- Spatial Multivariate Cluster Analysis for Defining Target Population of Environments in West Africa for Yam Breeding. 7 mega-environments identified, but what I want to know is if any are under-represented in terms of material in the genebank.
- Economic shifts in agricultural production and trade due to climate change. Under mitigation scenarios trade networks for agricultural commodities get more distributed, and possibly therefore more stable. So that’s another reason to mitigate C emissions, you know, apart from saving the planet.
Czeching the social value of crop diversity
Our friend Nik Tyack explains his paper Social Valuation of Genebank Activities: Assessing Public Demand for Genetic Resource Conservation in the Czech Republic. I think we included it in Brainfood recently, with the usual pithy summary, but it’s always nice to get it at greater length, and from the horse’s mouth to boot. Thanks, Nik.
Most attempts to put a value on genebank activities and the conservation of crop diversity have focused on specific uses of conserved materials. For example, Brennan and Malabayabas (2011) calculate that varietal improvement efforts using (among others) genetic resources from the genebank of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) yielded a high internal rate of return of 28%. Economists have also examined farmer preferences for the conservation of genetic diversity, like Poudel et al. (2009), who find that Nepalese rice farmers were willing to pay about $2 per year for ex situ conservation and $4 per year for in situ conservation of rice varieties. However, the total economic value of a properly conserved collection of crop diversity is not restricted to direct observed use or farmer preferences for conservation, but also includes a broader set of social values provided to the public, including option value, bequest value, insurance value, and existence value.
In this recent analysis, we take the case of the Czech Republic and use stated preference methods to generate an estimate of the social value of Czech crop diversity – focusing on elicited public preferences for crop diversity conservation at the national level. Using a properly managed online panel, we surveyed a nationally representative sample (n=1037) of Czechs (as well as a smaller sub-sample of 500 respondents from the agricultural region of South Moravia) to determine how much they would be willing to pay (WTP) to conserve a given number of crop varieties over the next ten years (using a double-bounded dichotomous choice model).
We find that Czechs, on average, were willing to pay about $9 (223 Czech crowns) for a crop diversity conservation program in general, regardless of the number of varieties conserved. This WTP estimate was about 12% larger for the average number of varieties offered in the valuation experiment (18), and about 24% more for the maximum number of varieties (35).
Aggregated across the Czech population (aged 18-69), we find that Czechs were willing to pay in total about $70 million for crop diversity conservation – 4.6 times more than the total conservation costs for the entire Czech agrobiodiversity conservation programme. Based on these results, we argue that the Czech Republic could safely expand their crop diversity conservation efforts given the public demand for these activities. As shown in the table below, our estimates of aggregate nation-wide WTP were consistently more than twice the conservation costs regardless of the model used.
The basic idea of the paper is that public decision-making about how much to spend on crop diversity conservation should include a consideration of how much the public cares about conservation, and in addition should acknowledge that a national collection of crop diversity does not just ensure the availability of material for plant breeders, but also provides a whole set of other values such as those provided by a national park system or public museums. For example, just as an individual may be willing to pay something to ensure that their children and grandchildren will have an opportunity to visit Yosemite, they may also be willing to pay something so that their descendants will have the chance to eat a favorite fruit variety.
The estimates we provide represent an approximation of this social value of crop diversity conservation for the case of the Czech Republic. The study illustrates an empirical approach of potential value for policymakers responsible for determining funding levels for genetic resource conservation, and similar empirical work may be used to potentially provide justification for increased spending on the conservation of crop diversity worldwide.
How to do seed longevity experiments
The article “Seed longevity phenotyping: recommendations on research methodology,” by Fiona Hay and others, is now freely available online. Read the whole thing, and note the use of DOIs, if you’re thinking of phenotyping seedlots for longevity or storability. But here’s the bottom line, just to whet you appetite:
- Use ageing conditions that are appropriate to the potential downstream use of the findings. Ideally such conditions should be standardized to enable comparisons across studies and perhaps, species.
- Take enough samples for germination testing such that a survival curve can be fitted to the data and appropriate parameters determined.
- Specify if seeds were de- or adsorbing moisture; determine the MC of the seeds if they are placed in a controlled-RH environment (e.g. over a saturated salt solution).
In an earlier Brainfood I said it was behind a paywall, which I swear it was when I checked, but that’s not the case anymore, thank goodness.
Brainfood: Makapuno, Middle Eastern dogs, Date palm origins, Speedy NUS, Red apples, Apple characterization, Phenotyping double, Assisted migration & pathology, Soya diversity, Sustainable intensification, Seed research, Cucurbita history, Potato value chains, Livestock ES
- Towards the Understanding of Important Coconut Endosperm Phenotypes: Is there an Epigenetic Control? Maybe.
- Dogs accompanied humans during the Neolithic expansion into Europe. All part of the Fertile Crescent package.
- Genomic Insights into Date Palm Origins. Domesticated in the Gulf region, but in a more complicated way than used to be thought.
- Speed breeding orphan crops. Worth the extra cost.
- Malus sieversii: the origin, flavonoid synthesis mechanism, and breeding of red-skinned and red-fleshed apples. Not just good for pest and disease resistance.
- Can you make morphometrics work when you know the right answer? Pick and mix approaches for apple identification. Good job they differ in colour too.
- Systematic establishment of colour descriptor states through image-based phenotyping. Doesn’t work for brown, though.
- High-throughput method for ear phenotyping and kernel weight estimation in maize using ear digital imaging. And the colour doesn’t matter.
- Amplifying plant disease risk through assisted migration. Making AM great.
- Characterization of a diverse USDA collection of wild soybean (Glycine soja Siebold & Zucc.) accessions and subsequent mapping for seed composition and agronomic traits in a RIL population. One of the parents of the RIL population was a wild accession.
- Plant Responses to an Integrated Cropping System Designed to Maintain Yield Whilst Enhancing Soil Properties and Biodiversity. So far, so good.
- Seed longevity phenotyping: recommendations on research methodology. Ok, now there’s no excuse.
Oh, well, except for the paywall. - Evolutionary and domestication history of Cucurbita (pumpkin and squash) species inferred from 44 nuclear loci. All 6 crop taxa in one clade, and some novel relationships with wild species.
- Value Chain Development and the Agrarian Question: Actor Perspectives on Native Potato Production in the Highlands of Peru. Difficult to penetrate the socio-economic jargon, especially without access to the full text, but I think it’s saying that to understand why some value chains for native potatoes work and others don’t, you have to understand that different players want different things. Which seems kinda obvious so I probably don’t have that right.
- Perception of livestock ecosystem services in grazing areas. Not all bad.
DOI DIY
Remember when we told you that you could comment on the draft guidelines for the use of DOIs in plant genetic resources conservation and use? Well, I hope you did, because now they’re out, thanks to the Seed Treaty’s work on developing a Global Information System. Here’s one of the authors, in case you were wondering. And on the same website, that of the Genebank Platform, you can also find out about how his, and the other CGIAR genebanks, are implementing DOIs.