- Ok here goes, there’s a week’s work of Nibbles we’ve got to catch up on.
- World running out of chocolate! Tell that to Cologne.
- Yeah well I prefer tea to cocoa.
- Greenpeace: “Smart breeding” will save us, not GMOs. Breeders: All breeding is smart.
- Guess the world’s biggest cash crop. Yeah, that one.
- Alas, it’s not included in the recent strategy for conserving medicinal plants. Not that it would need conserving.
- The domestication of the world’s biggest crop, period. Deconstructed. And if you want to drill down.
- And of the world’s biggest fruit.
- And of the world’s biggest pet.
- And of the world’s most difficult to eat vegetable.
- Root “vegetables” made simple. Because winter.
- And why you must eat your veggies, including the difficult ones.
- Videos on Kew’s monocot database and on the renovation of another famous herbarium.
- The real Johnny Appleseed.
- But you too can save seeds, just like Johnny.
- But don’t forget to safety duplicate, like CIP has done, at Embrapa.
- And this shows you what those seeds can look like.
- You don’t necessarily need seeds to save plants, though.
- Mapping fallen fruit. Because we can.
- Road trip!
- Boat trip!
- Selected Techniques in the Art of Agriculture. From French to Turkish to Arabic. One of many nifty agriculture-related resources in the World Digital Library.
- Oh yeah, the IUCN World Parks Congress has been on and its all over the intertubes. Including with neat visualizations, natch.
- How many of the species in the COMPADRE database of plant demography information are in protected areas? How many are crop wild relatives? I need an intern.
Brainfood: Enset & cattle, Evolution Canyon, Indian spices, Bohemian fruit rhapsody, ILRI forage genebank, Wild sunflower, Agroecology, Holistic hazelnuts, Culture & conservation, Salty broomcorn, Fancy mapping, German cherries, Ethiopian barley nutrients
- Sidama Agro-Pastoralism and Ethnobiological Classification of its Primary Plant, Enset (Ensete ventricosum). The Sidama feed the high-protein parts of enset to cattle and then get their protein from milk. Seems a roundabout way of going about things but I guess they know best.
- Evolution of wild barley at “Evolution Canyon”: adaptation, speciation, pre-agricultural collection, and barley improvement. One-stop shop for researching evolution of a crop wild relative.
- Spices and Condiments: Status of Genetic Resources and Setting Priorities for Introduction in India. National Bureau of Plant Genetic Resources is on the job, collecting at home and acquiring from genebanks abroad.
- Inventory and conservation of fruit tree landraces as cultural heritage of Bohemian Forest (Czech Republic), indicators for former settlements of ethnic minorities. That would mean Germans. No word on whether the database has been cross-checked with that of BLE-IBV. Interested in the topic of European landraces in general? Try this from Bioversity.
- Forage Diversity: An Essential Resource to Support Forage Development. ILRI’s genebank deconstructed.
- Wild Sunflower Species as a Genetic Resource for Resistance to Sunflower Broomrape (Orobanche cumana Wallr.). Pretty much all the perennial species have resistance, and many of the annuals. Thank goodness for the USDA collection, eh?
- Agroecological Research: Conforming — or Transforming the Dominant Agro-Food Regime? Bit of both? Is that such a bad thing?
- A multidisciplinary approach to enhance the conservation and use of hazelnut Corylus avellana L. genetic resources. Holistic, even.
- The Cooked is the Kept: Factors Shaping the Maintenance of Agro-biodiversity in the Andes. Keep your culture, keep your crop diversity.
- Response of broomcorn millet (Panicum miliaceum L.) genotypes from semi arid regions of China to salt stress. 39 out of a core collection of 195. Result!
- Vital Signs: Integrating Data To Visualize the Human, Agriculture, and Nature Nexus. Sounds promising enough an effort to bring together livelihoods, production and environmental data, but when you go to the website (for Tanzania in this case), all you get is a bunch of admittedly very pretty pdf maps.
- Phenotypic and genotypic characterization in the collection of sour and duke cherries (Prunus cerasus and ×P. ×gondouini) of the Fruit Genebank in Dresden-Pillnitz, Germany. …give different results. If I had a dollar…
- Genome-wide association mapping of zinc and iron concentration in barley landraces from Ethiopia and Eritrea. There are QTLs. Now what?
Nibbles: Cannabis, Brachiaria, Grasslands, Oryza, Taxonomy resources, Artocarpus, Quercus, Zea, MAS, GBIF
- “Something researchers are looking at is which cultivars, or strains, of hemp are best for the various uses — fiber, oil, nutrition, etc.” Love that etc.
- Speaking about grass: Brachiaria goes home, to wild acclaim.
- Did someone say wild? Wild grass needs help!
- Rice is a grass. Oh my yes.
- How to keep up to date with taxonomic research online.
- Pacific Regional Breadfruit Initiative gets an award.
- You can also make flour from acorns.
- And maize: what’s a grit?
- Greenpeace touts MAS.
- Next thing you know they’ll be singing the praises of Big Data. Yeah, maybe not.
The identity of “millet” in East Africa
A blog post from the Chicago Council on Global Affairs a couple of days ago reminded me that we had blogged about GYGA — the Global Yield Gap and Water Productivity Atlas — a couple of years back. Just to remind us all
…the target of the Global Yield Gap Atlas (GYGA) is to provide best available estimates of the exploitable yield gap (Yg-E) — difference between current average farm yields and 80% of Yp and Yw. Water resources to support rainfed and irrigated agriculture also are limited, which means efficiency in converting water to food, water productivity (WP), is another key food security benchmark included in the Atlas.
I’ve had a quick look at the GYGA website, and it seems serviceable enough, though it has the drawbacks, often remarked on in these pages, that it is difficult to share the maps you make, and import your own data into them. Here I’d like to point out another potential issue, though. This is what you get when you look at the yield gap for “rainfed millet.” Because of the aforementioned drawbacks, a clunky screenshot is the best I can manage, I’m afraid.
Now, the stuff in West Africa is clearly pearl millet, but what about in East Africa? Is there really that much pearl millet in Uganda, say? This is what Genesys knows about the two millets in East Africa. And yes, it’s a clunky screen grab too, but if I had wanted to, I could have downloaded separate KML files for the two crops and opened them both in Google Earth and then exported a nice JPG.
Pink is pearl, yellow is finger. There’s a little bit of pearl millet in Uganda, but not all that much. The millet there is mainly finger millet. So, which is the millet in GYGA? Is it confusing the two?
Comparing the niches of wild, feral and cultivated tetraploid cottons, Conclusion
We’re trying something new for us this week. Dr Geo Coppens co-authored an interesting paper ((Coppens d’Eeckenbrugge, G., & Lacape, J. (2014). Distribution and Differentiation of Wild, Feral, and Cultivated Populations of Perennial Upland Cotton (Gossypium hirsutum L.) in Mesoamerica and the Caribbean PLoS ONE, 9 (9) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0107458)) recently which brings together a number of our concerns: domestication, diversity, crop wild relatives, spatial analysis… He’s written quite a long piece about his research, which we’ll publish here in three instalments. This is the third and final instalment. Here’s the previous one.
Understanding the causes of the large difference between the distributions of TWC and that of cultivated and feral cottons is crucial for future breeding efforts. On one hand, the strong genetic divergence between wild and feral G. hirsutum that we have found in a sister SSR marker study may be partly related to differential selection and adaptation, and/or to the difficulty for domesticated forms to get established in a hostile environment. On the other hand, there is little doubt that much of the difference lies in the distinct ecological interpretation to be given to their respective models. Indeed, we may consider that the distribution of cultivated cottons approaches that of the fundamental niche of the species (i.e. where abiotic factors are favourable), which is obviously wider than the realized niche (further constrained by biotic factors, including competition).
Indeed, biotic factors are much less important under cultivation. For feral plants, we may refer to another niche concept: source-sink relations between cultivated and feral populations may explain how the latter may be found in unsuitable habitats (Pulliam, 2000). Logically, escapes from cultivation simply persist in the vicinity of cultivated cottons, in recently abandoned fields or along roadsides, benefitting from the open agricultural landscape. Why do feral populations observed further from cotton fields and dooryards, in more developed secondary vegetation (our ‘wild/feral’ category), present a very similar climatic envelope, and not an intermediate one? In fact, once interspecific competition has been avoided or reduced at the seedling stage, ancient escapes may persist for long, even in relatively high secondary vegetation. This is consistent with germplasm collectors’ reports (e.g. Ulloa et al., 2006) that feral populations are morphologically similar to local races of cultivated cotton, and that they are getting rarer as the cultivation of perennial cotton declines in Mexico.
The cotton example shows the relevance of ecological niche concepts even in the seemingly straightforward study of crop plant distribution, and particularly in the context of domestication studies, where it is crucial to distinguish between wild and feral forms. Comparing cultivation areas of domesticated forms with the original distribution of their wild relatives does not allow direct inferences on crop potential for climatic adaptation. Getting back to the tetraploid cotton example, niche conservatism after more than 1 million years of species diversification (the age of the AADD allotetraploid Gossypium genome) should make us more cautious in evaluating the result of 10,000 years of breeding on crop climatic adaptation. While there is no doubt that domestication and cultivation have resulted in widening of crops’ climatic envelopes, we need to understand much better the respective shares of genome and environment in the process. In the face of global climate change, we will need the tools of both genetic improvement and agroecology.
References
Brubaker CL, Wendel JF (1994) Reevaluating the origin of domesticated cotton (Gossypium hirsutum, Malvaceae) using nuclear restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP). Am J Bot 81: 1309–1326. doi: 10.2307/2445407
Coppens d’Eeckenbrugge G, Lacape J-M (2014) Distribution and Differentiation of Wild, Feral, and Cultivated Populations of Perennial Upland Cotton (Gossypium hirsutum L.) in Mesoamerica and the Caribbean. PLoS ONE 9(9): e107458. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0107458
Fryxell PA (1979) The Natural History of the Cotton Tribe (Malvaceae, Tribe Gossypieae): Texas A&M University Press, College Station, TX. 245 p.
Hutchinson JB (1954) New evidence on the origin of the old world cottons. Heredity 8: 225–241. doi: 10.1038/hdy.1954.20
Hutchinson JB, Silow RA, Stephens SG (1947) The evolution of Gossypium and the differenciation of the cultivated cottons: Emprire Cotton Growing Corporation. 160 p.
Miller AJ, Knouft JH (2006) GIS-based characterization of the geographic distributions of wild and cultivated populations of the Mesoamerican fruit tree Spondias purpurea (Anacardiaceae). Am J Bot 93: 1757–1767. doi: 10.3732/ajb.93.12.1757
Pulliam HR (2000) On the relationship between niche and distribution. Ecology Letters 3: 349–361. doi: 10.1046/j.1461-0248.2000.00143.x
Russell J, van Zonneveld M, Dawson IK, Booth A, Waugh R, et al. (2014) Genetic Diversity and Ecological Niche Modelling of Wild Barley: Refugia, Large-Scale Post-LGM Range Expansion and Limited Mid-Future Climate Threats? PLoS ONE 9(2): e86021. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0086021
Sauer JD (1967) Geographic reconnaissance of seashore vegetation along the Mexican Gulf coast; Mc Intire WG, editor. Baton Rouge. 59 p.
Stephens SG (1965) The effects of domestication on certain seed and fiber properties of perennial forms of cotton, Gossypium hirsutum L. The American Naturalist 94: 365–372. doi: 10.1086/282377
Thomas E, van Zonneveld M, Loo J, Hodgkin T, Galluzzi G, et al. (2012) Present Spatial Diversity Patterns of Theobroma cacao L. in the Neotropics Reflect Genetic Differentiation in Pleistocene Refugia Followed by Human-Influenced Dispersal. PLoS ONE 7(10): e47676. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0047676
Ulloa M, Stewart JM, Garcia EA, Godoy S, Gaytan A, et al. (2006) Cotton genetic resources in the Western states of Mexico: in situ conservation status and germplasm collection for ex situ preservation. Genet Resour Crop Evol 53: 653–668. doi: 10.1007/s10722-004-2988-0
Wendel JF, Brubaker CL, Seelenan T (2010) The origin and evolution of Gossypium. In: Stewart JM, Oosterhuis DM, Heitholt JJ, Mauney JR, editors. Physiology of cotton. Dordrecht: Spinger, Netherlands. pp. 1–18.