- Wild spuds to the rescue.
- Won’t be much use in NW Nigeria, alas.
- Livestock might, though.
- Wait wait wait…
- Ok, start again, how about wild rice in situ then?
On being ambitious for agrobiodiversity
The authors of “Set ambitious goals for biodiversity and sustainability” are not kidding around:
In response to the goals proposed in the draft post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) made public by the CBD, we urge negotiators to consider three points that are critical if the agreed goals are to stabilize or reverse nature’s decline. First, multiple goals are required because of nature’s complexity, with different facets—genes, populations, species, deep evolutionary history, ecosystems, and their contributions to people—having markedly different geographic distributions and responses to human drivers. Second, interlinkages among these facets mean that goals must be defined and developed holistically rather than in isolation, with potential to advance multiple goals simultaneously and minimize trade-offs between them. Third, only the highest level of ambition in setting each goal, and implementing all goals in an integrated manner, will give a realistic chance of stopping—and beginning to reverse—biodiversity loss by 2050.
What does “the highest level of ambition” mean for genetic diversity? Check out the handy table provided.
And there’s also a box listing the red lines for the ecosystem, species and genetic diversity goals. This last should:
- Include maintenance of genetic diversity—the raw material for evolutionary processes that support survival and adaptation; population size is not an adequate proxy for this.
- Be set at the highest ambition level (e.g., above 90% of genetic diversity maintained).
- Focus on populations and their adaptive capacity and include wild species and domesticated species and their wild relatives.
No word in this paper on how to measure whether that 90% figure is being met and maintained, for all species. That’s a whole other story, that some of the authors are actively working on. Fingers crossed.
Nibbles: CePaCT job, Banks, Business, Food System 2030, AnGR book
- Very cool genebank job going in Fiji.
- Banks should do more to support genebanks…
- …because it makes business sense.
- The German government is on board with Food System 2030.
- Nice book on the history of conservation of heritage livestock breeds.
Brainfood: Now what edition
- Image-Based Goat Breed Identification and Localization Using Deep Learning. Fancy maths can identify goat breeds from photos. Ok, cool, now what?
- AI Naturalists Might Hold the Key to Unlocking Biodiversity Data in Social Media Imagery. Fancy math can often identify common flowers on Flickr. Ok, cool, now what?
- FoodMine: Exploring Food Contents in Scientific Literature. Fancy maths can trawl the literature to pick out the chemical components of different foods. Ok, cool, I guess, now what?
- Cultural and linguistic diversities are underappreciated pillars of biodiversity. Well, yeah. But now what?
- Global priority areas for ecosystem restoration. Fancy maths says restoring 15% of converted lands in identified priority areas could avoid 60% of expected extinctions while sequestering 30% of the total CO2 increase in the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution. Cool, now what?
- An unexpectedly large count of trees in the West African Sahara and Sahel. Wait, does that mean some of the above won’t be necessary?
- Cost and affordability of nutritious diets at retail prices: Evidence from 177 countries. Fancy maths shows that nutritious diets are almost 3 times as expensive as diets supplying basic energy needs, and costs increase with remoteness. Ok, cool, now what?
- Phylogenetic inference enables reconstruction of a long-overlooked outbreak of almond leaf scorch disease (Xylella fastidiosa) in Europe. The olive plague started on almonds. Ok, now what though?
- Genome-wide association study in accessions of the mini-core collection of mungbean (Vigna radiata) from the World Vegetable Gene Bank (Taiwan). Genotyping, phenotyping and fancy maths find that mungbean could grow in temperate conditions. Ok, cool, now what?
- Enhancing the searchability, breeding utility, and efficient management of germplasm accessions in the USDA−ARS rice collection. Genotyping and fancy maths can improve genebank management. Well, yeah, but now what? No, wait, we know exactly now what: digital genebanks!
- Ok, that was a bit of fun, but the important point is that research, no matter how cool, is only the beginning.
Genebanks and “no regrets” options
One of the reasons I haven’t been very active on here for the past couple of weeks is that I’ve been busy at work with a little thing called the Chatham House Dialogue on “Crop Diversity for Challenging Times: the Role of Genebanks in Sustainable Development.”
The Chatham House Dialogue comprised three separate sessions that aimed to build a vision of how genebanks can play a fuller and more effective role in helping agriculture meet future challenges. Special attention was paid to the evolving role of the international genebanks managed by the CGIAR. The key findings and recommendations of the dialogue were written up as a brief statement and, together with background documents prepared for the Dialogue, were used as the basis for a System level review of CGIAR genebank costs and operations (GCO review).
It’s all described on the website of the CGIAR Genebank Platform. There you’ll find the background papers, presentations, a brief personal summary by your truly, and videos of some of the participants.
The bottom line?
In these circumstances, indeed, conserving crop diversity is the ultimate option to ensure “no regrets.” If it is useful in good times, it is absolutely essential under TUNA ((That is, characterized by turbulence, uncertainty, novelty and ambiguity.)) conditions. The participants could not envisage any future scenario, at whatever scale, in whatever part of the world, in which agriculture’s need for crop diversity—whether intra- or inter-specific—was likely to decrease. There will be changes in the nature of the demand, for sure, but not an absolute decrease. Countries, institutes and people are in fact likely to become ever more interdependent for crop diversity, and not only because of climate change, but also because of changes in pests and diseases, in consumer demand, and in trade, to name just a few major drivers. Interdependence requires shared governance and trust, which led to a plea from one participant that researchers become more politically active.