- Frank Rijsberman aims to build a “strong Consortium.”
- Teaching tools aim to improve capacity in plant breeding. And no, I didn’t mean anything by the juxtaposition, settle down.
- Kenyan reality show aims to enhance rural livelihoods. What, are you trying to be funny? No, I tell you, it’s all a massive coincidence.
- You know what, why don’t we just all go to the beach and relax? Nothing like combining work with pleasure…
- You could read the new Plant Cuttings there.
- Or look at 3D photos of cabbages.
- Or fiddle with the latest geeky plant gadget.
- PDF of the European dictionary of domesticated and utilised animals. From the folks at the European Regional Focal Point for Animal Genetic Resources (ERFP). Which is news to me. Relationship to the equivalent on the crops side unclear.
- Speaking of Europe, someone at the Dutch genebank studying gaps in the conservation of crop wild relatives. Welcome to the club.
- Well this sort of thing is not going to help with any gap analysis, is it? Qualifies as assisted migration though, perhaps, which is kinda cool. And may well be needed.
- I wonder what the Brazilian forest code means for crop wild relatives.
- Traditional Japanese rice variety grown in Queensland to help Fukishima victims. Well, yes, but it’s not exactly charity we’re talking about here. And what’s it going to do to all the wild rice there? Which I’m willing to bet is a gap of some kind.
- Speaking of altruistic gestures, the idea to, er, sell the Indian genebank encounters some, er, opposition.
- No plans to sell anything from this new Jersey apple genebank. Except maybe the cider? I wonder, any hazlenut genebanks out there? No, don’t write in and tell me.
- The genebank of the SADC Plant Genetic Resources Centre given a bit of a face-lift on VoA. At least in the trailer, starting at 0:45. Not sure how to get the full thing, but working on it…
- Latvian government plants small veggie patch in meaningless gesture. Paparazzi promptly tread all over it. Not that such things can’t be nice, and indeed useful. Oh, and here comes the history. But maybe they should have taken a slightly different tack.
- “Orange is the colour of curry.” Why spice is nice. And here comes the science on that.
- And speaking of heat, FAO very keen to tell you what zone you’re in. Oh, hell, there go another couple hours down the drain as I try to navigate the thing.
Happy International Day for Biological Diversity
Once again, May 22 rolls around as an opportunity “to increase understanding and awareness of biodiversity issues,” as the Convention on Biological Diversity puts it. This year the focus is on marine biodiversity. So we’re going to look at rainforests. And agriculture.
The Copenhagen Consensus is an interesting attempt to have a bunch of economists (usually) work out where to find the best return on investments in development. The deal is that people write a paper examining interventions designed to tackle a development problem (nutrition, AIDS, clean water …) and a bunch of other experts decide which interventions make most economic sense, given a limited pot of money. The big list of “16 investments worthy of investment” came out a week ago, with better nutrition at No. 1. At No. 6 is “creating an increase in agricultural productivity through research and development,” one of three policy options offered in response to the challenge to reduce the loss of biodiversity.
Here is Copenhagen Consensus Capo Bjorn Lomborg’s summary of the value of that:
The authors estimate that with a $14.5 billion annual infusion into research we can achieve 20 percent higher annual growth rates for crops and 40 percent higher growth rates for livestock, which over the next 40 years will significantly reduce pressures on nature and hence help biodiversity.
The other favoured option to reduce biodiversity loss is to “prevent all dense forests from being converted to agriculture”. Preventing deforestation has a benefit:cost ratio of between 3 and 30, while the benefit:cost ratio for increased agricultural R&D is between 3 and 20. (A third option — “increasing the amount of protected areas globally to around 20 percent” — is barely worth trying because it seldom reaches break-even, with benefit:cost ratios of between 0.2 and 1.4)
There’s a lot one could (but won’t) say about the Conpenhagen Consensus approach and assumptions; it is odd that investing in agriculture is part of the solution to biodiversity loss, although it is not a big part of solutions to undernutrition. And the value of agricultural biodiversity specifically is nowhere to be seen.
Which will do as our contribution to increasing understanding and awareness of biodiversity issues.
Nibbles: Mapping Life, PES, Quinoa, Forest restoration
- Mapping Life is live. Will livestock and crops eventually be there?
- How Valuing Nature Can Transform Agriculture. Errr … dunno. Is this really brainfodder?
- A humble agronomist considers the de-commoditisation of quinoa in Bolivia.
- Bioversity says that forest restoration should make better use of genetic diversity.
Brainfood: Species prioritization, In situ costs, Mycorrhiza, Crop diversity indicator, Diet diversity indicator, Ag & Nutrition, Chestnut blight, Oyster translocation, Maize introgression, Italian asses, New hosts for pests
- Species vulnerability to climate change: impacts on spatial conservation priorities and species representation. Yes, you can focus on sensitive species, but it comes at the cost of representativeness.
- Estimating management costs of protected areas: A novel approach from the Eastern Arc Mountains, Tanzania. Those are $ costs per pixel on the map, which I’ve never seen before. Don’t think they took into account the effects of climate change, though. Maybe they should get in touch with the Aussies above?
- The use of mycorrhizal inoculation in the domestication of Ziziphus mauritiana and Tamarindus indica in Mali (West Africa). It would help.
- A new integrative indicator to assess crop genetic diversity. Includes varietal richness, spatial evenness, between-variety genetic diversity, and within-variety genetic diversity. Not much left, really. Anyway, remember this from last week? Anyone out there going to put 2 and 2 together?
- Assessing Nutritional Diversity of Cropping Systems in African Villages. A new tool! Different from the integrative indicator above! Anyone going to put 4 and 2 together?
- Agriculture-Nutrition Pathways Recognising the Obstacles. “The pathways between agriculture and nutrition seem to be laden with impediments, particularly in the form of intricate household preferences.” Those pesky preferences.
- The chestnut blight fungus world tour: successive introduction events from diverse origins in an invasive plant fungal pathogen. Asia to N. America to Europe, but more than once. All very complicated. The surprising thing is that low diversity and low admixture have nevertheless still resulted in success in disparate places. What fiendish molecular or biochemical mechanism is behind this? Only more research will show, natch.
- Translocation of wild populations: conservation implications for the genetic diversity of the black-lipped pearl oyster Pinctada margaritifera. Introducing some wild individuals near farms leads to more diverse farmed populations, right? Nope. The farmed populations are way diverse already and if anything the diversity is moving the other way.
- Maize x Teosinte Hybrid Cobs Do Not Prevent Crop Gene Introgression. That’s because the hybrid cobs break apart much more easily than maize.
- Detecting population structure and recent demographic history in endangered livestock breeds: the case of the Italian autochthonous donkeys. Microsatellites confirm existence of 8 breeds of Italian donkey, though there is also significant substructuring within each by farm. This apparently calls for a “synergic management strategy at the farm level,” which basically means using the breed as the unit of conservation but being careful about inbreeding.
- Evolutionary tools for phytosanitary risk analysis: phylogenetic signal as a predictor of host range of plant pests and pathogens. Work out host susceptibility by looking at existing pest preferences and phylogenetic distance from the stuff the pest is known to like.
Brainfood: Pollinator threats, Predicting drought tolerance, Markets and conservation, Groundnut oil composition diversity, European wheat landraces, Dung beetles, Livelihoods, Phenology
- Impact of landscape alteration and invasions on pollinators: a meta-analysis. Habitat alteration and invasions equally bad on visitation rates, invasive animals more bad than invasive plants, and disturbance of the matrix more than fragment size. But there are some differences among vegetation types.
- The determinants of leaf turgor loss point and prediction of drought tolerance of species and biomes: a global meta-analysis. Osmotic potential at full turgor could be used to predict drought tolerance across species. Cut a long story short, that simplifies down to salty cell sap, give or take. Good for choosing crop wild relatives to use in breeding for drought tolerance?
- Market-based instruments for biodiversity and ecosystem services: A lexicon. If you want to tell your tradable permits from your reverse auctions. And really, who doesn’t?
- Phenotypic and molecular dissection of ICRISAT mini core collection of peanut (Arachis hypogaea L.) for high oleic acid. Much diversity in oleic acid (O) to low linoleic acid (L) ratio found. Breeders alerted.
- Phenotypic diversity and evolution of farmer varieties of bread wheat on organic farms in Europe. There wasn’t much of it, over 3 years.
- A Comparison of Dung Beetle (Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae) Attraction to Native and Exotic Mammal Dung. They really know their shit.
- Small-scale farming in semi-arid areas: Livelihood dynamics between 1997 and 2010 in Laikipia, Kenya. Life continues to be a bitch, there’s no other way to say it. But when will the people who measure livelihoods measure the diversity of people’s assets as well as their size?
- Climate-associated phenological advances in bee pollinators and bee-pollinated plants. About 10 days over the past 130 years, most of the change since 1970, and bee plants keeping pace with bees.