- Pepe gets a prize from a queen.
- The Princess of the Pea gives no prizes, though.
- Oldest farming village in a Mediterranean island found on Cyprus. No royalty, alas.
- The Emperor of Agricultural Statistical Handbooks is out. Oh, and the online source of the raw data has just got some new clothes.
- Fish are in trouble. Well, not all. Kingfish, queenfish, king mackerel and emperor angelfish all unavailable for comment.
- No royalty connected with these beautiful pictures of Asian fish either. Does a former Dutch consul count?
- Quite a crown on this wild goat.
- The Royal (geddit?) Botanic Gardens Kew’s Breathing Planet Campaign: The Video.
- ICIMOD on the role bees (including, presumably, their queens) in mountain agriculture.
Mapping nutrition research
The Leverhulme Centre for Integrative Research on Agriculture and Health (www.lcirah.ac.uk) and the University of Aberdeen are embarking on an interesting project for the UK’s Department for International Development.
The objective of the project is to map the growing research activity on agricultural interventions to improve nutrition in low-middle income countries and identify “gaps” in current and anticipated research.
You might like to consider contributing information if you are undertaking or planning research with a
focus on an interaction between agriculture and nutrition, such as agricultural interventions to improve nutrition and their evaluation, the influence of agricultural practices and food value chains on nutrition, governance and policy processes through which agriculture and nutrition are linked, and links between agricultural productivity and/or growth and nutrition at a macro scale etc.
The people to contact are Corinna Hawkes (corinnahawkes “at” o2.co.uk) and/or Rachel Turner (rachel.turner “at” lshtm.ac.uk). It could be your research, or research you know about. Or indeed relevant networks (mailing lists, online fora, communities of practice) you participate in.
No doubt someone will eventually mash up the results with all the clever maps now available on HarvestChoice‘s recently revamped website.
The cutting-edge MAPPR, for example, enables users to pick and choose among hundreds of “layers” of map-based information about all aspects of smallholder agriculture in Africa—from poverty to rainfall—and make customized maps and summary tables.
But more on that tomorrow. Stay tuned…
LATER: It occurs to the blogger, belatedly, that “to map” has more than one meaning. Ooops.
Brainfood: Bee diversity, Fodder innovation, African agrobiodiversity, Quinoa economy, Fragmentation and diversity, Rice in Madagascar, Rice in Thailand
- Management increases genetic diversity of honey bees via admixture. No domestication bottleneck there!
- Enhancing innovation in livestock value chains through networks: Lessons from fodder innovation case studies in developing countries. Fodder innovators of the world, organize. If you don’t, you will lose your value chains.
- Introduction to special issue on agricultural biodiversity, ecosystems and environment linkages in Africa. Special issues? What special issue?
- The construction of an alternative quinoa economy: balancing solidarity, household needs, and profit in San Agustín, Bolivia. Despite the allure of fancy denominations of origin and the like, old-fashioned cooperatives, and the much-maligned intermediary, manage to hang on in there.
- Species–genetic diversity correlations in habitat fragmentation can be biased by small sample sizes. Can.
- The original features of rice (Oryza sativa L.) genetic diversity and the importance of within-variety diversity in the highlands of Madagascar build a strong case for in situ conservation. Actually the way I read it, the stronger case is for ex situ. But see what you think.
- Population structure of the primary gene pool of Oryza sativa in Thailand. In situ Strikes Back.
Nibbles: Livestock, CWR, Extremophiles, Museum exhibits
- How livestock help feed the world.
- The latest CWR newsletter from PGR Secure.
- “…humans have inadvertently been probing the environmental envelope of carbon-based life for thousands of years simply by experimenting with pickling, salting, smoking, and refrigeration.”
- A better way for museums to preserve rice plants. In other news, museums interested in preserving rice plants.
The how and why of indicators of agricultural biodiversity
Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that one crop variety does disappear every single day. The question still remains: does it matter? After all, the variety that was just lost yesterday might be very similar to one that’s still out there today. That’s part of the reason why a group of French researchers has just come up with “A new integrative indicator to assess crop genetic diversity,” which is the title of their paper in Ecological Indicators. 1
Christophe Bonneuil and his co-workers thought that, given the data, they could come up with something more powerful and more widely applicable than richness (i.e. the number of different varieties) or the standard diversity indicators (i.e. various combinations of richness and evenness). So they started with number of varieties, but then they factored in the relative extent to which each was grown in their study area, the departement of Eure-et-Loire in France (which is the evenness bit), how genetically distinct each was (which is the bit which addresses the pesky question of how different the variety that disapeared today is from all the other ones left behind), and how much genetic diversity there was inside each.
They got the data on genetic differences among varieties by comparing genebank samples of all the wheat types grown in Eure-et-Loire from 1878 and 2006 at 35 microsatellite loci, and data on acreage of each variety at different points in time from various archival sources. Internal genetic diversity was set at one of three values derived from the literature, depending on whether the variety was a landrace, an old commercial line or a modern pure line.
They put all that together into this monster indicator of allelic diversity in the landscape,
and then calculated it for different times periods, and got this:
That shows a decrease in diversity as landraces are replaced with modern varieties, but, interestingly, something of a resurgence after the mid-1960s, as more diverse germplasm is introduced into breeding programmes. The indicator has been on a downward trend just lately, as the genetic relatedness of the most frequent varieties has increased. 2 Overall, it’s maybe a 50% drop since 1878. Not entirely dissimilar to the iconic 75% figure, and at least this wasn’t plucked out of thin air.
Interesting enough, but check out the trend in number of varieties over the same period:
Totally different. Pretty much an upward trend, albeit with some stuttering. Certainly no evidence from these data of massive erosion of diversity. Maybe the findings of Jarvis et al. (2008) that simple richness can be a useful indicator of diversity should be applied with caution if you’re not just dealing with landraces.
But how significant is it really that the value of this particular indicator of diversity, for all its fanciness, has decreased? Has anyone actually suffered as a result? I don’t know, but a second paper I came across this week suggests how one could find out. Roseline Remans and others associated with the Millennium Villages Project have a study out in PLoS ONE which adds yet another — different — nuance to diversity. 3 Their index considers not just how many different crops are grown on a farm, but also how different they are in their nutritional composition. Think of it as the nutritional analogue of the inter-varietal genetic diversity term in the French indicator. The more different in nutritional composition two crops are, the more complementary they are to local diets, the more important it is that both are there, the higher the resulting “functional” diversity index. And in fact the authors did find a positive relationship between their diversity indicator and nutritional status, at least at the village level.
Easy to imagine (though perhaps less easy to actually implement) a further refinement of Bonneuil et al.’s indicator which additionally integrates nutritional data, to yield an indicator of crop genetic and functional diversity. And, of course, once you have such a super-indicator, it might actually be possible to reward people on the basis of their success in maintaining it at high levels. Which, as it happens, is the subject of yet another paper I happened across last week. 4 But maybe that’s a paper too far for now. 5