- Unpacking the heat of chillies.
- Debating pastoralism, a new journal.
- Celebrating (instead of growing?) yams.
- Economic Botany releases free download of paper on caimito domestication.
- More than 50,000 people care about Pavlovsk Experiment Station. Unstoppable?
- A bean diversity fair was held in Uganda on the 21st of June 2010. Did we miss it then?
- Searching for the Blue Zebra … tomato. Wonder if AVRDC know about it.
- Those blogging diplomats — How to make a scarf from a tree.
- Tibet’s disappearing grasslands. Pastoralists see item 2 above.
- IRRI DG says, in Latin America, that Latin America could be next global rice bowl. Well, he would, wouldn’t he. Very data-heavy presentation.
- One VERY remote sunflower wild relative. Very cool.
- Chaffey’s regular words of wisdom on anything botanical. Well, mostly wise. But more on that later…
- The history of the apple in the early US.
- IUCN does for African freshwater fish what it does best. Ring the alarm bell.
Nibbles: Permaculture, Bird flu, Malnutrition, Roots & tubers in E Africa, Sweet potato
- Perennial fodder crops to the rescue.
- Cool bird flu maps. GIS to the rescue.
- Persistent malnutrition? We know how to fix it. That’s the tragedy. Meanwhile, let’s consult the e-atlas.
- Cassava and potato to the rescue.
- Orange+purple sweet potatoes to the rescue.
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.
Prizes for agrobiodiversity movers and shakers
Two of the recipients of the 16th Heinz Awards for “providing solutions to global environmental challenges,” announced yesterday, have agricultural biodiversity connections. Cary Fowler’s work is of course well know to our readers:
At a time of massive environmental change, it is an absolute necessity to preserve the world’s crop biodiversity. Lack of crop diversity threatens the world’s basic food security, and it is highly significant that scientists like Dr. Fowler work to strengthen inventories of plant genetic resources.
Gretchen Daily’s perhaps less so.
Dr. Gretchen Daily is a globally renowned scientist and Stanford University professor who is acknowledged for her innovative work to calculate the financial benefits of preserving the environment. Dr. Daily has advanced a remarkable new vision that harmonizes conservation and human development. Her work illuminates the many valuable benefits that flow from “natural capital” – embodied in Earth’s lands, waters and biodiversity – to supporting human well-being.
Today she also won a Midori biodiversity prize.
Much of Daily’s research seeks to get businesses thinking about the environment. In 2004, she published a paper showing that coffee plants located near forests in Costa Rica are more productive than other plants because they are pollinated by bees living in the forest. The bees boost the yearly income of the average farm by $60,000, she estimated.
Maybe the two recipients should get together and figure out how to get business to pay for genebanks. Congratulations to both.
A disappointing International Year of Biodiversity, so far
The Pimm Group uses Google Trends to track interest in biodiversity in this, the International Year of Biodiversity, and finds itself less than impressed. No change in overall interest since September 2009.
Of course, this evaluation depends on our measure of success. Perhaps it’s too soon to say the IYOB has “failed.” There are many ways to measure success and I have just chosen one that is readily available. Certainly the additional publicity for biodiversity is better than none at all.
Caution duly noted.
I confess, I don’t have the courage to do the same for agricultural biodiversity, in part because there is no one simple term that might capture interest. Myself, I have another metric. It is captured in this paragraph from a Press Release issued yesterday by the Convention on Biological Diversity, which some people seem to think is somehow responsible for the conservation of biodiversity.
Ahmed Djoghlaf, Executive Secretary of the Convention on Biological Diversity, said the General Assembly meeting [of the United Nations] would provide an important boost for the Convention’s upcoming 10th meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP-10) in Nagoya, Japan, next month. COP-10, he said, is expected to adopt a new strategic plan for 2011-2020, including a 2020 biodiversity target and a 2050 biodiversity vision.
Missed your target? Find a new one! Miss that? Show vision! Handbaskets, this way please, your pitchforks await.