- Book on history of plant breeding reviewed.
- Rust never sleeps.
- Ask not what next generation sequencing can do for you.
- Long-term datasets in biodiversity research. Nothing about genetic diversity though. Bummer.
- And genetic diversity is important, is it? Yep, it increases productivity, at least in Arabidopsis.
- No evidence of adaptive evolution in plants. What? Surely some mistake? I’m serious. And don’t call me Shirley.
- The latest from Worldwatch on African leafy veggies. Again, some links would have been nice.
- And Worldwatch also interviews Gary Nabhan on Vavilov.
- You can browse Tropicos specimens in Google Earth.
- Using pepper to protect stored rice.
- More evidence of the goodness of shade coffee.
- The diversity of Bosnian apples.
- Mammal plus bird species richness explains 72% of country-to-country variation in the number of human pathogens. Diversity begets diversity. But which way does the causality go?
- Phytophthora infestans in Estonia: “…higher proportion of metalaxyl resistant isolates from large conventional farms than from small conventional farms or from organic farms.” Metalaxyl is a fungicide.
Genebanks shenebanks
Why bother building and maintaining huge robotic genebanks, I hear you ask? They’ll just take over the world and we’ll end up having to deal with the Terminator in a few years’ time, no? Well, as it happens there are two pieces today on the Worldwatch Institute’s blog which explain the reasons. Yassir Islam of HarvestPlus says that researchers are “scour[ing] seed banks to find seeds that contain the desired nutrients and then breed these into popular varieties using conventional methods.” And Cary Fowler of the Global Crop Diversity Trust turns to Ug99:
Where do you suppose scientists are looking for a way to deal with the disease? Just as Professor Borlaug did, they are screening hundreds of varieties of wheat to find one that shows resistance to the disease. Where would we turn if we did not have that diversity available in genebanks?
What more do you need? Oh yeah:
The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that a third of all genetic resources for food and agriculture have already been lost in the last 100 years.
Right. But at least it’s an improvement on 75%.
Nibbles: Climate change, Monitoring, Evaluation, Vegetables, FAO newsletters, Guardians
- Climate change to bring lemons in Kent. Now for the bad news.
- Monitoring biodiversity in Africa and India.
- More Free Air Concentration Enrichment (FACE) research facilities needed, say those who work there.
- Ethnic vegetables? Yep, you heard me.
- Non-Wood Forest Products and Plant Breeding newsletters are out. Subscribe already!
- W.S. Merwin: poet and Guardian of Biodiversity.
Too many early warning systems spoil the broth
The EU-funded operation will improve food security of more than 860 000 rural households, over 6 million people. The aim is to boost food production by making improved seeds available to needy farmers and to promote sustainable seed multiplication and certification.
Difficult to argue with the aim of this FAO project in Burkina Faso. One could perhaps offer alternatives as to the methods, but it is difficult to argue with the aim, and with the urgency of the situation. So the only observation I’ll offer — and not for the first time — is that it would be nice if projects of this kind also included a little bit of money for a rapid assessment of whether local landraces are adequately conserved ex situ in the national and international genebanks, and for their rescue collecting as necessary. FAO has a Global Information and Early Warning System on Food and Agriculture which identifies problem situations such as that currently unfolding in Burkina Faso. But it also has a World Information and Early Warning System on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture. One sometimes has to wonder whether the two talk to each other.
Save Pavlovsk!
Angry about what’s going on at Pavlovsk? Want to do something about it? The Global Crop Diversity Trust has a suggestion.