Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
For all those ((Well, the one person.)) who asked me where the Genetic Resources Institute is in Baku, here it is:
It’s a veritable oasis in the middle of urban sprawl, what with its various fruit tree collections all around the newly expanded building. The circular structure is where the regional conference on “Diversity, characterization and utilization of plant genetic resources for enhanced resilience to climate change” was just held.
I’ve been travelling so I missed the announcement a couple of days ago on their blog that our friends at CCAFS ((That’s the CGIAR’s research programme on Climate Change, Agriculture & Food Security, do keep up.)) have a new all-singing, all-dancing platform called the Adaptation and Mitigation Knowledge Network. ((No, don’t ask me how it relates to this.)) Which is annoying because the issue of changes in the suitability of the climate for potato cultivation came up in the discussions at the meeting I’m attending here in Baku. And I would quite happily have stolen something else from CCAFS for my presentation. ((Not that it would have been easy. You can’t really share the AMKN maps.)) The conference is called “Diversity, characterization and utilization of plant genetic resources for enhanced resilience to climate change” and it was hosted by the Azerbaijan Genetic Resources Institute with support from a number of CGIAR Centres active in the region and FAO, which provided funding for the project of which the meeting is one of the activities.
There were researchers from pretty much all of the countries of the Central Asia and Caucasus (CAC) region, plus Turkey, Iran, Ukraine and Russia to boot. Many of the presentations brought home to me — and not for the first time — what a tremendously rich part of the world this is for agricultural biodiversity: wild asparagus with stems five meters long; grape varieties sporting bunches almost as long as your arm; strange interspecific wheat hybrids with branched spikes; medicinal plants for every ailment you can think of; wheat landraces phenomenally high in zinc and iron. And that’s just the lunch. Fortunately, the place is also rich in talented researchers busy studying their agrobiodiversity, conserving it, and using it for health, nutrition and food security.
Sure, they have problems. Where do they not? But there seems to be a real commitment to getting the job done, enthusiasm even. I was particularly struck by the relatively close linkages between genebanks and breeding programmes in many of the CAC countries. That you certainly don’t see everywhere. I wonder if it’s a legacy of the VIR system. They could do with more collaboration, coordination and sharing of responsibilities at the regional level, not to mention better integration with the rest of the world. But maybe this meeting will help. Anyway, all the presentations, abstracts and final recommendations will be online soon. I’ll post something when they’re up and you can make up your own minds.
ACIAR has just published a huge study of the impact of IRRI’s rice breeding work in SE Asia. The press release has the key numbers:
But I guess the figure the Australians were really after is that in the final table:
A pretty decent return.
Good to see the pioneering work of IRRI (and others) in documenting pedigree information in a usable way recognized — and indeed made use of. And good to see the International Network for Genetic Evaluation of Rice (INGER) and its use of the International Treaty’s multilateral access and benefit sharing system highlighted in the study as a model for germplasm exchange and use. Of course one would have loved to see the genebank’s role in producing the impact also recognized, rather than sort of tacitly taken for granted as usual, but maybe the data can be used to bring that out more in a follow-up.
I see another couple of opportunities for further research, actually. There is little in the study about the genetic nature of the improved varieties that are having all this impact. To what extent can their pedigrees be traced back to crop wild relatives, say? And, indeed, how many different parent lines have been involved in their development, and how genetically different were they? That will surely to some extent determine how sustainable these impressive impacts are likely to be.
The fact that distribution change occurs predominantly through spatially restricted, local population processes suggests that the development of ecological networks may be an effective conservation strategy for plant species in the UK (Lawton et al. 2010). An ecological network comprises sites which collectively contain the diversity and area of habitat needed to support species and which have ecological connections between them. The UK is largely made up of semi-natural habitats shaped by human land use, and so consequently, much of the UK’s wildlife is restricted to small fragmented areas of high habitat quality. These can rarely be restored to large unbroken areas of natural habitat. However, making connections between them through wildlife corridors and smaller ‘stepping stone’ sites is a much more feasible option, which would improve species ability to track environmental change through short-range colonisation (Hilty, Lidicker & Merenlender 2006).
…constraints imposed by climatic variability, limited dispersal and low persistence may mean that even habitat corridors through high-quality habitat may not in themselves make range shifts possible. Additionally, corridors for species that show high uncertainty between climate paths under different GCMs are less likely to be effective.
These are from papers in Journal of Ecology and Ecology Letters published within days of each other, though admittedly one dealing with plant species in Britain the other with amphibians in the USA. So what’s a poor boy to do? Stop thinking there’s one solution for everything, I suppose. And get everything into ex situ just in case.
Ever since I contributed to A methodological model for ecogeographic surveys of crops, and suggested that collectors should do this, I’ve been waiting for the time when it would be easy — or even possible — to map the distribution of conserved germplasm on top of cultural, ethnic or language boundaries. The problem has been that maps of such boundaries, ((And yes, I’m aware that there are problems with mapping languages et al., but for the purposes of this, let’s just say I don’t care.)) though available in various printed formats, have not been much digitized. Or at least I hadn’t come across them. Until I happened on a blog post about the Center for Geographic Analysis’ (Harvard University) WorldMap, an open source web mapping system. The layers provided include one called Ethnicity Felix 2001, which “consist of polygons and labels depicting ethnicity information based on the ‘People’s Atlas of Africa’ by Marc Felix and Charles Meur, Copyright 2001.” Perfect, I thought.
