Category: In situ

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Protected areas and crop wild relatives: opportunity or dead loss?

Just wanted to point out to everyone that the biodiversity vs agriculture conflict is being played out in the comments to a recent post of ours.

Danny says:

I can’t help but feel we, the agricultural biodiversity community, have failed to tap into the ‘spirit of Nagoya’, and that this has happened in the International Year of Biodiversity (IYB) may well represent a real missed opportunity.

Dave sees that and raises him:

…the only reason the conservationists want agricultural biodiversity is to document key wild relatives in reserves to prop up justifications for the failing system of protected areas.

Jump in, the water’s fine!

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Mediterranean hotspots get Nagoya love

It must be the spirit of Nagoya, because following the announcement of publication of a list of threatened plant species from IUCN and Kew, there’s news of a major conservation effort, this one focusing on the Mediterranean.

The areas targeted look to me like they might well have quite a few crop wild relatives. ((Yes, that’s understatement for effect.))

• Southwest Balkans
• Mountains, Plateaus and Wetlands of Algerian Tell and Tunisia
• Atlas Mountains
• Taurus Mountains
• Cyrenaican Peninsula and
• Orontes Valley and Lebanon Mountains ((The historical photo of the cedars of Lebanon is from Oregon State University’s archives.))

There’s more information on the project, including an ” ecosystem profile” and a call for proposals, on the website of the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund.

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Nibbles: Pavlovsk, Baobab hybridization, Jackfruit, Vavilovia, Cowpea education, Lead, Bees, Banana wilt, Dariy cows, Pavlovsk, Drylands, School gardens, Genetic diversity in botanic gardens

  • 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.
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Institutionology and scale in agricultural biodiversity conservation

The third in a series of dispatches from the front lines of agrobiodiversity conservation and use. That is, the 6th Henry A. Wallace/CATIE Inter-American Scientific Conference on “Agrobiodiversity in Mesoamerica — From Genes to Landscapes” at CATIE in Costa Rica.

Today we heard about the institutionology of agrobiodiversity — everything from the International Treaty to micro-credit systems — and something of the efforts to link the results of scientific study and market knowledge to practitioners and producers in the field. A representative of Starbucks, Jessie Cuevas, described the Coffee and Farmer Equity (CAFE) Practices, developed with the assistance of Conservation International, and the mission of their Farmer Support Centre in Costa Rica to ensure the quality of Arabica coffee by helping farmers to maintain good processing and production methods. Their guidelines include measures for agrobiodiversity management for watershed and shade preservation. When asked, Jessie said Starbucks was also interested in increasing the genetic base of the crop to improve quality and disease resistance, but are still exploring possible approaches.

Central American Markets for Biodiversity (CAMBio) run a $17million financing scheme for micro-, small- and medium-sized enterprises in Central America in support of biodiversity conservation and sustainable use, including organic coffee agroforestry in El Salvador, organic vegetable producers and wild blackberry exporters in Costa Rica. We also heard about INBio’s inventorying and mapping of 368 edible plant species gathered from 14,573 specimens in Central America herbaria. You can search the online database. One of the Symposium co-organisers, EcoAgriculture Partners based in Washington D.C., have set up an exchange between students at leading universities and practitioners in the field to help the transfer of on-the-ground experiences (and potential research questions) and the results of scientific research. Finally, an unscheduled presentation from a farmer network reminded us that farmers do all of the conservation and need to see some of the benefits.

The formal discussions were brought to an end with interventions from two CATIE staff that summed up nicely the difficulties that us agricultural biodiversity types face. After two days featuring numerous case studies of coffee and cacao agroforestry as probably the most species-rich agricultural systems in existence, Wilbert Philipps — the well-respected cacao expert — observed that the coffee and cacao cultivated within these systems is dangerously uniform and crop genetic diversity is seriously under-exploited. This was followed up by a remark from John Beer, CATIE’s Research and Development Director, that it might actually be quite useful to consider some of the disadvantages of diversity on farms. Clearly, we are still stymied by what we mean by the all-encompassing and usually misleading term agrobiodiversity, and we need to be ever conscious of the scale at which we are probing — what looks diverse and good at a landscape level may not look so diverse in the genes, and vice versa.

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Diversity at your service

More from a participant at the 6th Henry A. Wallace/CATIE Inter-American Scientific Conference on “Agrobiodiversity in Mesoamerica — From Genes to Landscapes” at CATIE in Costa Rica.

The ecologists at the Wallace Symposium today waded deeply into the functional role of diversity in agricultural systems. How much diversity do we need in order to get the full benefit of ecosystem services? Is some diversity redundant? What is the trade-off between a world of all things bright and beautiful and one of increased yields, healthy children and growing economies?

Prof. Teja Tscharntke of the Georg-August University in Göttingen presented numerous studies to illustrate the importance of at least a certain amount of wild biodiversity within or in close proximity to agricultural systems. In Andean potato systems, simpler landscapes, lacking heterogeneity in natural habitats, led to higher levels of the pestilential tuber moth and reduction in yields. Coffee systems in Indonesia near natural forest had higher bee species diversity and higher levels of seed set. Hand pollination of cacao had remarkably higher impacts on yields compared to the effects of other major variables, indicating the supreme importance of the near invisible midges that pollinate one of the most revered crops in the world.

But just how much of this wild biodiversity we need, and in what form, are just two of the many questions that are being posed. Teja brought up the SLOSS debate, dating back to the 1970s, of whether single, large or several small reserves will conserve more biodiversity. His findings suggest that many small habitats capture more heterogeneity. Fabrice DeClerck was back with a study of the relationship between species richness and function, using food crops as a model. In a study of households in Sauri in Kenya, he categorized food crops according to the nutrient services they provided — whether high in carbohydrates or proteins or specific vitamins, etc. Not surprisingly, functional richness (i.e. provision of all the major nutrients) was not necessarily associated with the highest species richness. You don’t have to grow everything to get your daily needs of protein and carbs, and for some nutrients (e.g. vitamin C) there is more species redundancy than others (e.g. folates). Well, I guess you had to be there!

The functional role of agrobiodiversity changes as you move from species to landscapes, and few principles can be transported across scales or systems. But that doesn’t stop a little healthy application of diversity when it’s needed. There was a nice case study of the use of plant diversity in and around Costa Rican farms of Dracaena to reduce pest populations that were causing exports of the ornamental plants to be held up by the US quarantine service. Secondary forest or certain types of cover crop can host populations of natural predators to the cicadellid pests. Consequently, the healthy plants passed through quarantine without a hitch and increased Costa Rica’s export revenues.