- Another website archiving phylogenetic trees? What are the odds? Well, they are different animals.
- Did we ever link to The Plant Press? If not, we should have.
- The quinoa controversy rumbles on. We’ve got that covered too. And since you’re at it, why not help revise the descriptors?
- Bad news for Africa: plant viruses. Ah but there are varieties for that problem, no? No? Well, you can always highlight the little blighters as research priorities.
- Good news for Africa: local vegetables.
- Sort of good news for Africa, I guess: livestock in slums.
- New website keeps an eye on Protected Area Downgrading, Downsizing, and Degazettement. Interactively, natch. Well, actually, not so much. Can’t export, or import. Maybe the mash-up will fix that. Anyway, most protected areas are in the wrong place, aren’t they?
- Conserving Chinese rice, one variety at the time.
- Latest installment of The Economist’s Feeding the World thing is happening right now, and you can follow it on Twitter using #feedingtheworld. Or maybe you’d like to re-imagine agriculture with the CGIAR instead?
- Apply for the latest installment of Wageningen’s PGR course.
Nibbles: Tree diversity, App diversity, Fish diversity, Botanist diversity, Conifer diversity, Genebank diversity, Cowpea diversity, Eurisco info diversity
- You saw it in Brainfood first, but now you can read a whole post about that paper linking tree species diversity with ecosystem services in ConservationBytes.
- Natural England launches an app competition. Me, I’d like to see this in an app (cf Australia). Mainly because I remember the days when we had to make such species distribution maps by hand.
- WCMC already has plenty of apps, it seems. As does CABI.
- Aquatic genetic resources getting catalogued, as a prelude to improved. Maybe they need apps?
- RBGE staff have more than an app for capturing data from herbarium sheets. They have a poster.
- Bet these Smithsonian guys had neither.
- Nor did they have Facebook pages, but the iCONic project does. And I’m sure it will help with protecting those iconic conifers. Geddit?
- CIMMYT replies to my query about where those Turkish landraces are going to be conserved. And ACIAR to my query about Timor Leste. What did we do before Twitter?
- We would never have got Ghana interested in improved cowpea varieties from Burkina Faso quite so fast before Twitter is my guess. And if the links to the tweets behind these three stories expire, you’ll be pleased to know I’ve storified them. And then had to unsatisfactorily export them to PDF when that website died.
- And Eurisco gets an RSS feed to go with that email newsletter!
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. 1 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. 2 The authors recommend smaller, more carefully chosen and better characterized ex situ collections, which fits in with the third point. 3 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.
Nibbles: Large pumpkin, Wheat genome, Timorese nutrition, Seeds for Needs, PPB, Fruit trees, Nutrition ROI, Ecosystem services, Coffee costs, Cacao flavour, Pig slaughtering, Goats threats, Dog diet, Australian migrations
- Wow, that’s one huge pumpkin!
- Genomic whiz-bangery, which was apparently not involved in producing the above pumpkin, continues to hold much promise for wheat yields. And your jetpack is in the mail. I would ban the use of the word promise in this type of article. But since I can’t do that, I promise not to link to them ever again.
- Jess gets to grips with Timorese nutrition. Get those local landraces back from any genebank that has them, Jess. And don’t forget to collect any remaining ones.
- Then you could do some cool Seeds-for-Needs-type stuff.
- And maybe some local breeding too?
- And don’t forget local fruit trees!
- Because you know investing in nutrition is really cost-effective.
- Though of course it’s not just about the money.
- Especially when it comes to coffee.
- Or cacao for that matter.
- They shoot hogs, don’t they? Maybe even in East Timor. Goats, alas, have problems of their own.
- And as for dogs, we forced them to digest starch. What even the dingo? I bet there are dingo-like dogs in East Timor.
It’s official: genebanks valuable
You may remember that back in the summer we blogged about a project to assign a monetary value to the Greek genebank. Well, although the project’s website says nothing about any results yet, a video has surfaced which does give some numbers. Here’s the money shot:
And that’s just insurance value. Add to that productivity benefits (which unfortunately are not given in the film), and divide by what it costs to run the place (idem), and you find that “the comparison is favourable — the benefits far far exceed the costs, which means that having the genebank, investing in the genebank, maintaining and developing the genebank, is a desirable policy.” Well, that’s kinda expected, but it’s good to hear it from a Professor of Economic Theory and Policy. We all, I’m sure, look forward to seeing the spreadsheet. Because yeah, sure, money isn’t everything, but it does talk. Especially, these days, in Greece.