Category: Genebanks

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Seems like all that rice breeding was worth it after all

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:

  • “Southeast Asian rice farmers are harvesting an extra US$1.46 billion worth of rice a year as a result of rice breeding.”
  • “…IRRI’s research on improving rice varietal yield between 1985 and 2009 … [boosted] … rice yield by up to 13%.”
  • “…IRRI’s improved rice varieties increased farmers’ returns by US$127 a hectare in southern Vietnam, $76 a hectare in Indonesia, and $52 a hectare in the Philippines.”
  • “The annual impact of IRRI’s research in these three countries alone exceeded IRRI’s total budget since it was founded in 1960.”

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.

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To corridor or not to corridor

Exhibit A

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).

Exhibit B

…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.

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Sorghum and ethnicity in Africa

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.

Sorghum accessions (Genesys) and ethnic groups in Uganda.
Well, not so fast. It was not altogether easy to download a shapefile of conserved African sorghum landraces from Genesys that would upload into WorldMap, plonk it on top of Ethnicity Felix 2001 and produce a shareable map. Not easy, but possible. It took some time and some divine intervention from Robert, but I do now have a map of African ethnic groups and sorghum collections that other people can have a look at. At left you have a snippet showing Uganda to whet your appetite. So now, in addition to things like ecogeographic gaps in collections, made possible by global climate surfaces, we can also begin to investigate cultural gaps.

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Nibbles: Elm disease, Kew genebank, Maize domestication, Wildlife vs livestock, Medieval figs, Alternative food security, Spineless lulo, Mangos for Haiti, Aubergine breeding, Urban ag in Japan, West African research