- Hang on, there’s a “revised and updated” Global Strategy for Plant Conservation. When did that happen?
- Gary Nabhan on following in Vavilov’s footsteps. You can hear him in person in Rome this Friday.
- Can you protect both agriculture and wildlife? Apparently so.
Nibbles: Sorghum and rice and climate change, Pacific agrobiodiversity today and yesterday, Japanese microbiota, Wolf domestication, Organic and fungi, Crop wild relatives, Bees, Hunger, Silk
- Sorghum going to need a hand in India. Rice in China? Maybe not so much.
- Photos of the 6th Annual Hawaii Seed Exchange.
- More Pacific stuff: 3000-year-old Lapita chickens were haplogroup E, “a geographically widespread major haplogroup consisting of European, Middle Eastern, Indian, and Chinese domestic chickens.”
- More on that thing about the gut biota being adapted to ethnic diets.
- Wolves may have been turned into dogs earlier than previously thought.
- Organic farming good for underground mutualists. Which sounds totally appropriate somehow.
- Crop wild relatives: all you ever needed to know.
- Bring back bees by bringing back the boy scout bee-keeping badge.
- Here’s a weird one. US to cut 1.5 trillion calories from food by 2015. And there are 1 billion hungry. You do the math.
- Farmers rear endemic moths on intercropped host plants for high quality silk in Madagascar. Enough hot buttons in there for ya?
Lots of seeds going to Haiti
First Monsanto donates hybrid seeds to Haiti. So then the Hudson Valley Seed Library says I see that and raise you some open-pollinated varieties. What I want to know is if someone will be monitoring the results.
LATER: Maybe there wont be much to monitor after all.
Nibbles: Allanblackia domestication, Rampion census, Mali reforestation, Indian sacred groves, Oysters, Seaweeds, Breeding organics, EMBRAPA, Fisheries bycatch, Writing NUS proposals, Nutrition mag, Biofortification
- Boffins trying to domesticate Allanblackia for its oil.
- Phyteuma spicatum must be saved, British folklore depends on it. How about domesticating it?
- Farmers replanting forest in inland Niger delta. Sort of domesticating the forest, you mean?
- And here’s another domesticated forest, this time in Kerala.
- Are oysters domesticated? And seaweeds? Lots of uses for seaweeds, after all.
- Why plant breeding is incompatible with organic agriculture. Eh? First of a trilogy.
- Management of plant genetic resources in Brazil deconstructed.
- Oh dear, now boffins say avoiding bycatch may not be good after all.
- CTA calls for research notes in preparation for proposal writing workshop on neglected and underutilized plants.
- New Sight and Life magazine is out, with interesting discussions of Vitamin A supplementation in newborns and HIV patients.
- While at Scidev.net HarvestPlus defends biofortified crops against charge of medicalizing micronutrient deficiency.
Getting to grips with ecological interactions
Something just in from our occasional contributor Jacob van Etten.
Climate change will shift the limits of the suitable areas of many wild animals and plants, including crop wild relatives. Some species may adapt by gradually moving into areas which resemble their current home area. In other cases, no bridges exist to connect old and new suitable areas and a helping hand may be needed. Translocating species, or “assisted migration” has complex risks and ethical implications. Another approach would be to intensify ex situ collection efforts aimed at those species vulnerable to climate change. “Niche modeling”, which matches species to specific climatic conditions is helpful to locate problem areas.
All of this assumes that currently animals and plants are mainly held in place by climatic factors. ((There are other issues with niche models as well and more sophisticated approaches are being developed.)) But what if this is not the case? Imagine the aftermath of a glaciation. The ice retreats and species start to move towards the poles to occupy new territory. Two competing species, A and B, start to expand their range, but A is a better disperser than A. Since species A arrives first in most places, competing species B is absent, but not because the area is not suited climatically for species B. This would seriously confuse a niche model and its ability to predict future distributions after climate change.
Gilman and co-authors review the evidence on how interactions between different species influences the impact of climate change on species in a recent paper. ((Gilman, S., Urban, M., Tewksbury, J., Gilchrist, G., & Holt, R. (2010). A framework for community interactions under climate change Trends in Ecology & Evolution DOI: 10.1016/j.tree.2010.03.002)) Experiments with fruit flies, literature reviews and modeling studies all show that biotic interactions are crucial in predicting the effects of climate change. However, most models to predict the effects of climate change on species survival ignore these interspecific interactions. The complexity of webs of ecological interactions makes it difficult to draw general conclusions.
Gilman et al. suggest a divide-and-conquer approach to solve the puzzle. They propose to split communities in small modules of 2-4 interacting species, each characterized by a different network of interaction (mutualism, predation, competition, etc.). Through coupled modeling and empirical studies focused on such modules, Gilman et al. hope that some general trends will emerge. Lots of work needs to be done, however, before ecologists will be able to distinguish those trends. Gilman et al. also note that putting the modules together in communities may not be straightforward.
Obviously, this approach requires massive data collection and experimentation, premised on the idea that in the end some pattern will emerge from the data and that it will be possible to predict community level phenomena from the constituent elements. In spite of the importance of all this work to gain insight in the workings of ecological communities, there is no guarantee that we will end up being able to predict species extinction before it happens. In my view, ecological interactions are just too complex to draw any hard conclusions from bottom-up studies. For instance, pollinator networks can change from year to year. And only part of this information on ecological interactions is relevant to predict species survival/extinction. The approach proposed by Gilman et al. seems to steer towards a mismatch between ecological work and the hard questions of management, conservation and policy making.
How can the ecological interactions relevant under climate change be understood without losing ourselves in the details while working with available data? The decreasing costs of DNA analysis and the push for citizen science for conservation will hopefully make more data on gene flow and species occurrence available for monitoring purposes. Would it be possible to infer interactions from these data?
In molecular biology inferring complex interactions from massive data is very common. Vera-Licona and Laubenbacher (2008) apply mathematical methods originally developed for the inference of biochemical networks to ecological interactions. The method makes it possible to pinpoint the sources of remaining uncertainty. It seems that the method is being picked up by others. My feeling is that work along these lines will become important to bring ecology closer to management practice.