You know that paper entitled Biodiversity redistribution under climate change: Impacts on ecosystems and human well-being, that we included in Brainfood a couple of weeks back?. The money quote was: “The indirect effects of climate change on food webs are also expected to compound the direct effects on crops.” Ok, well, you don’t have to read it. All you have to do is watch a 1.5 minute video.
Brainfood: Slow Food, Runner bean diversity, Bamboo diversity, Istrian grapes, Smelly cheeses, Wild pseudocereals, Diversity & phenology, VAM diversity, Oases apocalypse, Wild wheat physiology, PepperHub, Bactrian camel diversity, Swiss livestock, CWR conservation, Tree database
- Developing radically-new meanings through the collaboration with radical circles: Slow Food as a platform for envisioning innovative meanings. Companies should collaborate with radicals. Presumably in order to turn them. #resist
- Unraveling agronomic and genetic aspects of runner bean (Phaseolus coccineus L.). At least we know what we don’t know.
- Total leaf crude protein, amino acid composition and elemental content in the USDA-ARS bamboo germplasm collections. If you want to use bamboo as feed, you need to choose among the 100-odd species very carefully.
- The Gene Collection of Autochthonous Wine Grape Varieties at the Institute as a Contribution to the Sustainable Development of Wine Growing and Viticulture in Istria. 3591 seems a hell of a lot, but wow.
- Phage Biodiversity in Artisanal Cheese Wheys Reflects the Complexity of the Fermentation Process. Modern methods kill a lot of phages.
- Setting conservation priorities for Argentina’s pseudocereal crop wild relatives. Go north, young CWR researcher!
- Flowering phenology shifts in response to biodiversity loss. Experimentally decreasing diversity in a California grassland advanced phenology.
- Activity, diversity and function of arbuscular mycorrhizae vary with changes in agricultural management intensity. No-till helps VAM, helps soils.
- Oases in Southern Tunisia: The End or the Renewal of a Clever Human Invention? I’m not hopeful.
- Physiological responses to drought stress in wild relatives of wheat: implications for wheat improvement. 4 species show promise.
- PepperHub, a Pepper Informatics Hub for the chilli pepper research community. Hot off the presses.
- Molecular diversity and phylogenetic analysis of domestic and wild Bactrian camel populations based on the mitochondrial ATP8 and ATP6 genes. The wild species is not the ancestor, and the domesticated species is a geographic mess.
- GenMon-CH: a Web-GIS application for the monitoring of Farm Animal Genetic Resources (FAnGR) in Switzerland. Upload data on your herd or flock, end up with a map of where the breed is most endangered.
- Stealing into the wild: conservation science, plant breeding and the makings of new seed enclosures. Ouch!
- GlobalTreeSearch – the first complete global database of tree species and country distributions. 60,065, about 10% crop wild relatives.
Faux wild rice in peril
I’m not saying it’s the most important thing about it, but that oil pipeline that is planned for Minnesota will go straight through lakes which are sacred to the local Native American peoples, and which generate about 50% of the world’s annual harvest of handpicked wild rice (which is Zizania, not Oryza, but still).
Seeing the wood and the trees
The day after the Global Tree Assessment is published by BGCI, which revealed there are about 60,000 tree species in the world, is also a good time to link again to the wonderful European Atlas of Forest Tree Species. Now all we need is the same thing for Brazil, which has about 9,000 of those 60,000. BTW, a very quick check suggests that about 1% of trees are crop wild relatives, globally. More on this later.
This is what’s threatening crops around the world
Readers with a long memory will remember the Global Crop Loss Survey, which we blogged about here back in November. Just to remind everyone else:
Over a period of three months (November 2016 – January 2017), 1142 responses from 216 respondents in 67 countries were recorded during the Global Crop Loss Survey organized by the Crop Loss Subject Matter Committee of the ISPP [International Congress of Plant Pathology]. This appears to be the first Survey of this kind ever conducted.
Well, some preliminary results are out.
At this stage, a key question concerns the overall representativeness of the information gathered. Across all five crops, experts have reported losses lower than 1% in 15.4% of the cases, between 1 and 5% in 37.3% of the cases, between 5 and 20% in 33.7% of the cases, between 20 and 60% in 11.5% of the cases, and higher than 60% in 2.1% of the cases. A simple aggregate weighted average of these losses, in which loss levels are weighted by their reported frequencies, gives an overall crop loss of 11.7%. This figure would represent the average loss caused by an average disease (or pest), (1) when occurring, and (2) in the absence of any other disease or pest. Although a preliminary result, the estimated average loss is well within the ranges of global or regional crop losses that have been reported in the literature.
The money table is this:
Would be interesting to compare these data with the investment being made in breeding against, and indeed in germplasm evaluation by genebanks for, different threats. Analysis is continuing…