- Chocolate made from camel milk for the first time. And last?
- “Slow rusting” genes from Ethiopian wheat landraces.
- Brits (and Yanks, for that matter) look for ancient trees in woodlands becoming ever less distinctive.
- The world needs GM rice, but alas “the environment for accepting genetically modified crops is not as good as it should be.” Meanwhile, IRRI keeps hammering away at drought tolerance and resistance to other assorted stresses. It’s hard being rice.
- ICAR looks at the likely effects of climate change on crops and what can be done about it.
- Climate change making Soay sheep (and, incidentally, European fish too) not just smaller, also darker. Speaking of fish, there’s trouble in the Zambezi too, but not necessarily due to climate change. Although…
- A Greek seed bazaar.
- FAO turns to barn owls to stop Laotian rodent plague.
- US food policy destinations on Google Maps.
- Vermicomposting is good news for the Indian textile industry. Vermicomposting: I like saying that word.
Monitoring plants of “Community interest” in Europe
There’s been an item in the news the last couple of days to the effect that “[a] report by the European Commission shows that habitat and wildlife protection targets across Europe will be missed…” Digging a bit deeper into that seemingly simple statement led me to a hitherto unknown (to me) world of EU rules and regulations and reporting requirements.
Let’s start at the beginning. There’s a thing called the Habitats Directive (1992). This requests all Member States “to monitor habitat types and species considered to be of Community interest.” It’s unclear to me how they were selected (perhaps someone out there can tell us), but these species are listed in various annexes to the Directive, though that sounds more simple than it is:
Where a species appears in this Annex but does not appear in either Annex IV or Annex V, the species name is followed by the symbol (o); where a species which appears in this Annex also appears in Annex V but does not appear in Annex IV, its name is followed by the symbol (V).
Anyway, Article 17 provides for regular reports on implementation of the Directive, and the report “for the period 2001-2006 for the first time includes assessments on the conservation status of the habitat types and species of Community interest.”
The website which houses the Article 17 reports is, well, complicated, but well worth exploring. The most interesting bit from an agrobiodiversity perspective is the page from which you can get species reports. These include all kinds of information about the status of those “species considered to be of Community interest,” country by country (there’s also an overall summary). Some of these species “of interest” are crop wild relatives such as Allium grosii, an endemic to the Balearic Islands (click the map to enlarge it).
There’s a few more CWRs in those annexes, though not all that many. A Hungarian Pyrus, for example. Any chance to get a few more on there? The bureaucratic infrastructure and mechanism for regular monitoring and early(ish) warning of any threats would seem to be well and truly in place, European Union-style.
PBR dedicated to Tony Brown
Volume 31 of Plant Breeding Reviews is dedicated to Anthony H.D. Brown, the distinguished Australian conservation geneticist. Tony has been making fundamental contributions to the theory of crop genetic resources conservation through his work on sampling strategies, core collections and on farm conservation for forty years. But he has also worked tirelessly in the field, as the following little snippet makes clear:
If you happened to be one of the few vehicles driving the remote dirt Peninsula ‘‘highway’’ in Cape York, north Queensland, in July of 1983, you may have seen three collectors (Ted Hymowitz from Illinois and Jim Grace and Tony from CSIRO) sprawled on the lawn outside the Lakeland pub below the billboard saying ‘‘Ice Cold Beer.’’ This was no early knock off; they actually were sampling rare, tiny Glycine tomentella plants. The billboard had nothing to do with site selection; a collector must check all habitats. The roadside pub, a lone building in the rural landscape, was a haven for the thirsty traveler, and it surrounds a haven for wild plants that grazing animals would otherwise decimate. Thus, sampling strategies for germplasm collection adapt to reality.
You can read the full dedication courtesy of Google Preview. Well worth it. You get to know one of the giants of the field, and there’s a refresher course in the history of crop genetic resources and agrobiodiversity conservation thrown in for good measure.
Nibbles: Bats and bananas, Extension, Russian animal harvests, Rice improvement, Sacred groves
Livestock landraces and marginality in Europe
Visually, by comparing the map of INDEX2 (Fig. 6) [right] with the one of the distribution of breeds (Fig. 2) [left], it can be seen that the studied breeds seem to be consistently located in regions defined as marginal by the indices.
Well, maybe. Click on the image to see better. But it seems a stretch to me, and the more rigorous logit analysis that the authors subject the data to isn’t exactly overwhelming. If I understand it correctly, the best that a combination of various proxies for marginality can do in predicting the presence of local sheep and goat breeds is 19%. And that’s with breed distribution data which seems to be biased towards marginal areas anyway.
Local sheep and goat breeds are generally argued to be remarkably well adapted to marginal rural areas.
That’s certainly a dominant meta-narrative, and not just for livestock, for agrobiodiversity as a whole. I may even believe it. But not a huge amount of evidence for it here.