- USDA boffins tour Aussie garbage dumps.
- Today’s “Save the British X” (where X=a fruit of your choice) story comes to you from The Times.
- And today’s multiple independent domestications story comes from India.
- And today’s how to boost urban biodiversity? From Brighton, UK.
- Mapping Russian crops and their pests.
- Kenyan government messing with prices to clear wheat market, boost neglected species.
- Our friends at the Global Facilitation Unit (for Neglected and Underutilised Species) have published a book.
Frankincense and disharmonic energy fields
One of the more amazing travel experiences I had when I was working in the Middle East was to drive from Muscat through most of Oman to Salalah, the capital of the province of Dhofar, in the south of the country. You drive on and on for ten and more hours through desert, mile after mile of barren sand and rock. Then you go over a slight rise, and suddenly drop down an escarpment into a lush landscape of thickly forested slopes: the crescent-shaped mountains of Dhofar block the rain-laden clouds of the monsoon for months.
The leaward lip of that escarpment is the home of the frankincense tree, Boswellia sacra, the start of famous trade routes to the Mediterranean and India. And such pleasant recollections were prompted by an article in the NY Times on how frankincense “has the ability to generate this really powerful force field that has been shown to be able to neutralize and transmute what we call disharmonic energy fields.” Right. Let’s hope that New Yorkers’ demand for such force fields doesn’t lead to overexploitation.
Nibbles: Chips, Free fruit, Ornamentals
- Zebra chip is the latest disease to plague the potato industry.
- Urban fruit: An untapped resource.
- Selling English roses. No, the flowers.
Nibbles: Chocolate, Africa cubed, Green wall
- “I think that in 20 years chocolate will be like caviar.”
- “Why should Africa be the only region in the world that is begging for food?” Hans Herren stiffs it to Jeffrey Sachs.
- Mapping, and then protecting, places where wildlife and pastoralists can survive climate change together.
- Jessica hearts Moringa. ((How do I get a picture of a heart here?))
- Green Wall of Trees to halt Sahara. Will any of them also be directly useful?
The perils of protected areas
Does it make sense to conserve crop wild relatives in situ? That’s an extreme way of asking the question, I know, but maybe it is worth putting it as starkly as possible. To concentrate minds, let us say. Such musings were triggered (not for the first time) by the latest niche modelling study trying to predict what will happen to species distributions under climate change.
As usual, it’s not good. Working on the California flora, researchers at Berkeley found “that two thirds of … ‘endemics’ could suffer more than an 80% reduction in geographic range by the end of the century.” The average shift in range will be 150 km, and in many cases there will be no overlap between the old and new ranges. Current hotspots of diversity will disappear. That’s in line with studies more focused specifically on crop wild relatives.
However, “[t]he authors [also] identified several ‘climate-change refugia’ scattered around the state. These are places where large numbers of the plants hit the hardest by climate change are projected to relocate and hang on.”
The usual caveats apply. In particular, the exact results for a given species will depend on whether it can migrate and/or adapt fast enough to track changing climates. But let’s think it through. The global strategy for crop wild relatives conservation says we should
Identify globally, and within each region, a small number of priority sites (global = 100, regional = 25) for the establishment of active CWR genetic reserves.
Let’s assume we identify such a site, because of its interesting or high diversity, say. What would really be the best way of conserving the population(s) found there? If migration is fast enough to track climate across the landscape, surely it would be best to conserve the population ex situ, rather than moving the protected area every once in a while.
If migration cannot keep up with climate, there are only two possible outcomes. Either the population dies out, in which case of course ex situ is the only option. On the other hand, if adaptation occurs, and the population persists, the selection pressure is likely to be so strong and so centred on temperature and water availability, that many useful alleles for other non-climate related traits are likely to be winnowed out. Again, you’d probably want to conserve the population ex situ anyway.
So I guess the answer to the question I started out with is a heavily qualified affirmative. Yes, it does make sense to conserve crop wild relatives in situ. BUT. Only if you also do it ex situ, and only if you do it with a view to what distributions are likely to look like in a hundred years’ time. We should all be looking for those “climate change refuges.” But we should also be collecting those crop wild relatives as fast and as completely as possible.