Category: Threats

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Wild relatives to the rescue (again)

You may remember the recent warnings about a new strain of wheat stem rust called Ug99 making its way from the Rift Valley of Africa across the Red Sea to Yemen, thus threatening the very home of wheat in the Middle East. Jeremy blogged about it a couple of months back. Well, resistance to the disease has now been found in about 70% of the 100-odd samples of a wild wheat (Aegilops sharonensis) collected in southern Lebanon and Israel, according to a paper in Plant Disease. Four of the samples actually have resistance to a whole range of fungal diseases:

Co-author of the paper, Yehoshua Aniksterat, of the Israel-based Institute for Cereal Crops Improvement at Tel Aviv University, told SciDev.Net that although it could be difficult — and take up to five years or more — they may be able to transfer genes from wild to cultivated wheat.

The map below is what GBIF knows about the geographic distribution of A. sharonensis 1.

sharonensis.jpg

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What do you know about biodiversity?

That it has absolutely nothing to do with agriculture! That’s the only conclusion to be drawn from a report on the CABI blog about a study in the journal Biological Conservation. It reports a survey of “the general public” in the Cairngorm Mountains in Scotland, which tried to discover what they knew about biodiversity. (I’ve pinched my headline direct from them.) You might think the Cairngorms are not a very agricultural place, but you would be wrong. There’s a great deal of farming up there, to say nothing of timber industries. And some of the conservation efforts seek to duplicate farming practices that have fallen by the wayside. But to hear CABI tell it, even though the survey included foresters and “farmer students” there seemed to be almost no understanding of how agricultural practices are part and parcel of landscapes and their ecology. Bah!

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One up, one down

Following on from Luigi’s post a month or so back about the probable return of the chestnut to American woods, two stories, on consecutive days, from the Christian Science Monitor. One gives more information about the complex breeding programme that involves Chinese chestnuts, resistant American trees and lots of painstaking crosses to produce blight-resistant chestnuts. That work has been going on since the early 1980s, and may now be close to complete. A few days earlier, the paper reported on the threat to the Eastern Hemlock, a woolly bug, originally from East Asia. Adelges tsugae has been slowly spreading across the US, where the only hope seems to be a decent cold winter. The fear is that the Eastern Hemlock will go the same way as the Carolina Hemlock, which once shared the forests with the American chestnut and which, experts fear, could now be eaten out of existence.