- The value of Pavlovsk. Jeremy delivers a slap.
- CIRAD on kinky sex among the baobabs.
- “I had never heard that there were distinct varieties of the jackfruit, although of course such a thing was reasonable, so I naturally wanted very much to taste one.” Naturally.
- Wild relative of pea gets a weird hybrid in-ex situ conservation treatment.
- A Cowpea Story, an illustrative children’s book by Vicky Inniss-Palmer, tells the hopeful story of a cowpea named Catalina and her struggle to overcome illness and disease with the help of scientists. Meanwhile, scientists meet.
- Urban gardeners, beware lead. And nurture your pollinators.
- Reading this, anyone would think nobody had ever researched banana Xanthomonas wilt.
- Improved dairying in Kenya.
- Vavilov Institute’s comprehensive update on Pavlovsk.
- ICRISAT to put in place new market-oriented strategy which will use a “systems perspective in setting our priorities to ensure that all important issues along the dryland agriculture value chain are addressed.”
- Meanwhile, ASARECA asks for ideas on how to intensify one of those dryland systems in the face of climate change.
- ICIMOD promotes herbal gardens in schools.
- Botanic gardens get wrists slapped over their inattention to genetics.
Nibbles: Genebank, Guanaco, Maize, Wild food
- Maintaining a citrus gene bank. Just the book you need if you have to, er, maintain a citrus genebank.
- Guanacos need quiet.
- Don’t understand this piece on maize germplasm conservation and use.
- Indigenous food plants in trouble in the Philippines.
The Importance of Scientific Collections
The American Institute of Biological Sciences and the Ecological Society of America are among the scientific organizations around the world that have urged the Russian Federation to reconsider the decision to destroy the collections at the Pavlovsk Experiment Station. And they remind us that we do occasionally need to relate our concerns about agricultural biodiversity to wider concerns about biodiversity: it isn’t only our favoured collections that are threatened.
Lack of funds, loss of technically trained staff and inadequate protection against natural disasters, are jeopardizing natural science collections worldwide. For example, in May of this year an accidental fire destroyed roughly 80,000 of the 500,000 venomous snake-and an estimated 450,000 spider and scorpion-specimens at the Butantan Institute in São Paolo, Brazil. The 100-year-old collection featured some rare and extinct species and contributed to the development of numerous vaccines, serums and antivenoms. The building that housed these specimens, including what may have been the largest collection of snakes in the world, lacked fire alarm or sprinkler systems.
“Biological collections, whether living or non-living, are vitally important to humanity,” says Dr. Joseph Travis, president of the American Institute of Biological Sciences. “Natural science collections have provided insights into a wide variety of biological issues and pressing societal problems. These research centers help identify new food sources, develop treatments for disease and suggest how to control invasive pests. Natural science collections belong to the world and cannot be limited by geographic borders.”
Good points, well made.
Prizes for agrobiodiversity movers and shakers
Two of the recipients of the 16th Heinz Awards for “providing solutions to global environmental challenges,” announced yesterday, have agricultural biodiversity connections. Cary Fowler’s work is of course well know to our readers:
At a time of massive environmental change, it is an absolute necessity to preserve the world’s crop biodiversity. Lack of crop diversity threatens the world’s basic food security, and it is highly significant that scientists like Dr. Fowler work to strengthen inventories of plant genetic resources.
Gretchen Daily’s perhaps less so.
Dr. Gretchen Daily is a globally renowned scientist and Stanford University professor who is acknowledged for her innovative work to calculate the financial benefits of preserving the environment. Dr. Daily has advanced a remarkable new vision that harmonizes conservation and human development. Her work illuminates the many valuable benefits that flow from “natural capital” – embodied in Earth’s lands, waters and biodiversity – to supporting human well-being.
Today she also won a Midori biodiversity prize.
Much of Daily’s research seeks to get businesses thinking about the environment. In 2004, she published a paper showing that coffee plants located near forests in Costa Rica are more productive than other plants because they are pollinated by bees living in the forest. The bees boost the yearly income of the average farm by $60,000, she estimated.
Maybe the two recipients should get together and figure out how to get business to pay for genebanks. Congratulations to both.
From Genes to Landscapes in Mesoamerica
From a special correspondent at the 6th Henry A. Wallace/CATIE Inter-American Scientific Conference on “Agrobiodiversity in Mesoamerica — From Genes to Landscapes.” Taking place 20-24 September 2010, at CATIE, Turrialba, Costa Rica.
Four days packed with presentations and discussions on Agrobiodiversity in Mesoamerica. And what biodiversity! Beans, maize, coffee, cacao, peppers … there is little to match the domestication feats of Central America! As part of the backdrop to the meeting, hosted by CATIE in Costa Rica, the gently fuming Volcano Turrialba is a quiet reminder of the turbulent rise and fall of civilisations and the dynamism and resilience of their culture.
The dynamism of agricultural systems was a striking recurrent theme of the first day’s talks; a morning dedicated to agricultural landscapes and an afternoon on the agricultural diversity in the landscapes. The symposium organiser, Fabrice DeClerck of CATIE, gave an inspiring introduction to the meeting, insisting that biodiversity is no longer a luxury item on the world’s development agenda. No-one needs to persuade policy makers anymore that biodiversity is central to the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals — a point made by Peter Kareiva and Michelle Marvier in Conservation for the People.
The issue is not so much the importance of biodiversity anymore, but how to pin it down … or at least how to focus on the important parts. Chili peppers are not spicy because we like them that way. Or not only. The heat-inducing biochemicals make the chili seeds resistant to attack from fungi while maintaining their attractive appeal to bird dispersers. Human’s domestication and use of chili peppers as a major ingredient in indigenous cuisine the world over, of course, is a happy sideline to what is clearly the result of very dynamic ecosystem processes. So which bits to save?
Jeremy Haggar of CATIE illustrated further the amazing dynamism of agricultural systems. In a study of tree species in coffee agroforestry systems he inventoried 16 smallholder farms in Nicaragua. Among the 110 tree species he identified, farmers selected a small number of species (5 or 6) that they wished to remove from their farms in favour of more useful species. Three years later, returning to the same farms, he was surprised to find that more than 30 of 110 species had disappeared, but that some 30 species were also new to the farms. Natural processes of colonisation had been considerably more effective at changing species composition than the farmers!
Jeremy also rang alarm bells, repeated by a number of speakers, about another looming source of dynamism, climate change. There will be a 60% reduction in the area suitable for coffee cultivation in Central America by 2050, as these cultural systems are driven uphill. Systems may be dynamic but it is not clear how ultimately resilient they are.
From the species perspective, Xavier Scheldeman of Bioversity International and Daniel Debouck of CIAT both described loss of populations of unique crop diversity: Capsicum flexuosum, a rare chili wild relative, has disappeared from the few collecting sites from which it was known in Paraguay as soybean cultivation has taken over. Similarly, one of the few populations of a wild bean species in Costa Rica has been built over. New populations of C. flexuosum have, fortunately, been found using targeted, GIS-aided collecting. The bean is also, thankfully, safely secured in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.
So far, no connection has been made between crop species or relatives with priority traits for conservation and the ecosystems or landscapes in which they may be conserved. Clearly, a little more joined up thinking is needed. Bringing together this mixed bunch of scientists is a good start, and at the end of the four days the intention is to develop a white paper to guide policy-makers on priorities for agrobiodiversity conservation in Mesoamerica. Stay tuned!