- Wanna grow plants in the Jordanian desert? Invest $250,000.
- Wanna grow plants in the Maharashtra summer? Invest $20.
- There’s a world saffron crocus collection. Who knew? A review is coming.
- Coloured chickpeas contain more antioxidants. Well, yeah.
- SciDev.net says scientists say coastal trees not much good against tsunamis, and may be bad news generally.
- Rhizowen crosses species barriers, develops ficifoliaphilia, poor chap.
Australia offers agriculture fellowship
Happy to broadcast this opportunity.
The Crawford Fund is now calling for nominations for its Crawford Fund Fellowship for 2010.
The Crawford Fund Fellowship has been set up to provide further training for an agricultural scientist whose work has shown potential. This prestigious Award provides an opportunity for the successful candidate to spend a period of focussed study and training in Australia, with resulting benefits to the Awardee as well as to their country’s agriculture and to Australia.
Candidates should be below the age of 35 and from a selected group of developing countries (Bangladesh, Bhutan, Burma, Cambodia, East Timor, Fiji, Indonesia, Laos, Nepal, Niue, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Is, Tonga, Tuvalu and Kiribati, Vanuatu or Vietnam).
Applications close 12 April 2010. More details, application forms, etc etc here.
Invasiveness and extinction revisited
If you’ve been following (listening to?) our tweets 1 you might have seen this enigmatic little gem:
Population genetic diversity influences colonization success. K. M. CRAWFORD. Molecular Ecology: http://goo.gl/JFHh
And, possibly, ignored it. It must have registered at some level though, because when I saw Inbreeding bad for invasives too at C.J.A. Bradshaw’s blog Conservationbytes.com I thought, “Hmmn, I wonder if that’s the thing we tweeted”. 2 And it was. Bradshaw does a great job of explaining how it is that reduced genetic diversity contributes not only to a population’s risk of extinction, but also to its ability to invade new habitats.
Crawford & Whitney measured greater population-level seedling emergence rates, biomass production, flowering duration and reproduction in high-diversity populations compared to lower-diversity ones. Maintain a high genetic diversity and your invasive species has a much higher potential to colonise a novel environment and spread throughout it.
Of course, this is related to propagule pressure because the more individuals that invade/are introduced the more times, the higher the likelihood that different genomes will be introduced as well.
So far the experimental evidence comes only from Arabidopsis thaliana, the white rat of the plant biologist. But I’d be willing to bet that if you could measure such a thing as invasiveness and persistence for crop varieties, where people, rather than nature, determine how many propagules survive and spread, the ones that are both widespread and long-lasting are also the ones with the most genetic diversity.
Nominate a guardian of agrobiodiversity
The Diversity for Life campaign wants to celebrate the unsung contributions of individual farmers, scientists and others to conserving the diversity of plants and animals in the Mediterranean.
Know someone like that? Nominate them!
Healing plants of Kenya
The BBC has a nice slide show on the Earthwatch Institute’s medicinal plants project with a Samburu community in Kenya.