- Disease risk perception and diversity of management strategies by farmers: The case of anthracnose caused by Colletotrichum gloeosporioides on water yams (Dioscorea alata) in Guadeloupe. Farmers gauge the disease pretty much the way scientists do, and use a diversity of mitigation measures, including diversity.
- Ghosts of Cultivation Past – Native American Dispersal Legacy Persists in Tree Distribution. “In the southern Appalachian region, honey locust distributions are more a reflection of Native American cultural practices.”
- Good year, bad year: changing strategies, changing networks? A two-year study on seed acquisition in northern Cameroon. In bad years, women call on extended networks.
- Conservation narratives in Peru: envisioning biodiversity in sustainable development. In terms of the relationship between conservation and development, there are biodiversity protectionists, traditionalists, localists, pragmatists, and capitalists.
- Diversity analysis based on agro-morphological traits and microsatellite based markers in global germplasm collections of roselle (Hibiscus sabdariffa L.). Nicely complementary datasets show that fibre type more diverse than calyx type.
- Extinction probabilities of Hassawi cattle from Saudi Arabia using Population Viability Analysis. Fancy maths gives it 20 years.
- Genome to Phenome Mapping in Apple Using Historical Data. Going back to old phenotype data in GRIN allowed identification of SNPs for color, fruit firmness, and harvest time.
- Genomic and archaeological evidence suggest a dual origin of domestic dogs. Independent domestications from different wolf populations in East Asia and in Western Europe, with the latter partially displacing the former.
The Adam and Eve of apples?
It was 1993 and US Department of Agriculture (USDA) horticulturist Phil Forsline flew over the magnificent mountain ranges of south-eastern Kazakhstan in a helicopter. Forsline had not been to the huge Central Asian country before; with the recent fall of the Soviet Union, this was his first chance to visit its wild forests. It was here, scientists now believe, that the ancestors of the apples sold in supermarkets around the globe originally evolved. Forsline was on a quest to find out what was really out there, in those mountain gardens.
The appearance on the BBC website of a long piece on the remarkable apple diversity of Kazakhstan and USDA’s efforts to conserve it, which leads with that mouth-watering paragraph above, reminded me that there was a much weirder little article a few weeks ago on much the same subject that I also wanted to point to. If only for the rhetorical flourishes it unleashes:
There are currently 7,500 varieties of apples in the world today — incredibly though, basically every single one of these can be traced back to a Mother and Father tree in a mysterious Kazakhstan forest.
…
In these Kazakh forests, bears, being the picky buggers that they are, would only pick and eat the sweetest apples.Then they’d go and wander around poop everywhere and the seeds of these sweet, delicious apples were spread around.
Then humans cottoned on and were all “hey, sick apples, bears – we’re gonna eat and grow these to stuff in our mouths as well.”
Then we started only growing these apples which is why out of the thousands of apple varieties that originated from these forests, only 15 of them end up in our grocery stores.
So now, thanks to a group of scientists’ gene sequencing magic, we know that 90% of all apples can be traced back to a Mama and Papa tree thousands of years ago – that was most likely eaten by a bear and then pooped out all over the place.
Very cool.
Incidentally, those bear-filled apple forests have recently been formally recognized with the International Carlo Scarpa Prize for Gardens. And of course they’re not new to the attentions of the popular scientific press. And the not so popular, all due respect to Steppe magazine.
But what you really want to know is where that assertion that all apple varieties can be traced to two trees comes from. Well, so did I, and I asked around, including the apple people at USDA. Nearest I can figure it, it may be based on the fact that an oldish paper looking at the taxonomy of apples found a wild accession in the USDA collection that shared a bit of chloroplast genome with many domesticated varieties. According to the abstract:
Two matK duplications were found, one in series Malus and the other in most M. domestica cultivars and one Central Asian M. sieversii accession.
Here’s what that looks like, from a different paper by the same authors with fancier graphics.
It’s all true about the bears though.
Over millions of years, millions of bears just prior to hibernation slowly and unconsciously selected the larger and sweeter fruits of the neo-apples. Bears do have a sweet tooth, as A. A. Milne noted in Winnie the Pooh. The relative inefficiency of a bear’s jaw in crushing fruit has another unintended consequence. As we have seen above, seeds that remain within the tissue (placenta) of the apple do not germinate. Herb Aldwinckle of Cornell University told me he has noticed that very small apples pass intact and uncrushed through a bear’s jaws and gut and, in one or two cases, were seen intact in the fecal mass. The seeds in the small intact fruits would not have germinated. It does not pay, in a genetic sense, to be a very small apple in the Tian Shan.
LATER: Oh, man, I forgot to link to Jeremy’s podcast.
Brainfood: Italian chickens, Maca genome, Ordonomics, AnGR, Stuffed potato, Biological control, Wild pea, Rice landraces
- Genetic variability of two Italian indigenous chicken breeds inferred from microsatellite marker analysis. Two Piedmontese breeds are closer to British breeds than other Italian or continental chickens. And poorly managed to boot.
- Genome of plant maca (Lepidium meyenii) illuminates genomic basis for high altitude adaptation in the central Andes. It’s the whole genome duplications, stupid.
- Rationalizing the GMO Debate: The Ordonomic Approach to Addressing Agricultural Myths. Yeah that’ll work.
- Factors and determinants of animal genetic resources management activities across the world. Capacity, says fancy maths.
- Accumulation of Genetic Diversity in the US Potato Genebank. The collection may need to double.
- Structure, function and management of semi-natural habitats for conservation biological control: A review of European studies. There is plenty of information on natural enemies in natural habitats (though not in woodlands, surprisingly), but not much on whether they make it to adjacent fields and actually have an effect on pests.
- Prospects of the use of wild relatives for pea breeding. More work needed. Starting with translating this thing from the Russian.
- Genetic Diversity Analysis Reveals Importance of Green Revolution Gene (Sd1 Locus) for Drought Tolerance in Rice. Back to the landraces.
SOTWP Day 2: Useful plants, plant health and invasive plants
Our friend Nora Castañeda summarizes the second and final day of Kew’s State of the World’s Plants Symposium. Here’s the first day if you missed it. Thanks again, Nora, and see you next year.
The second day of the SOTWP Symposium was also organized in three sessions: Useful plants, plant health and invasive plants.
Ann Tutwiler, DG of Bioversity International, started the day with the idea of super-superfoods: crops that can help targeting nutrition, adaptation and resilience at the same time. Tutwiler also accompanied her presentation with a review of the different the projects that Bioversity leads with underutilized crops and crop landraces around the world. After Tutwiler, I presented our work on the global priorities for improving the conservation of crop wild relatives in genebanks. Dr Claude Fauquet from CIAT followed me, and reminded the audience why cassava is an important crop for food security in Africa, and why it is also called the Rambo Root. Finally, Dr Olwen Grace from Kew presented her phylogenetic exploration of medicinal uses, and in particular her research on the chemistry of succulents.
After the (much needed) coffee break, Prof. Adam Kleczowski began the plant health session with a review of the impact of (appropriately) coffee diseases. Prof. Gary Foster followed with perhaps the presentation that caught the audience’s attention most, thanks to his particular style. He talked about how we’ve recorded plant pathogens and their impacts throughout history, including the expensive tulip bulbs infected with viruses during Tulipmania, and the devastating consequences of Phytophtora infestans in Ireland in the 1840’s. According to Foster: these did not only include the infamous famine, but also the movie Titanic). Prof. Sarah Gurr the presented her cutting-edge research on pests and diseases, including newly emerged diseases that may affect biodiversity and the need of having a more biosecure world, the distribution of crop pests and diseases (and its economic and physical drivers), and what’s going to happen with climate change. Closing the session, Tony Kirkham from Kew shared some of the challenges he and his team are facing in keep the trees in the arboretum alive, and their field observations on how climatic events are affecting the arboretum. Longer winters and summers, and shorter autumns and springs, are apparently not at all good for some of the species in the gardens.
The last session of the symposium dealt with invasive plants and some of the existing global policies for combating them. Dr Montserrat Vilà presented on the impacts of invasive species at the ecosystem level: in aquatic habitats, to pollination, and to phylogenetic diversity. Spoiler alert: it’s not good. Prof. Philip Hulme continued with his talk on the environmental costs of weedy-ornamental plant species, illustrated with the beauty of an invasive species in New Zealand: lupins. Hulme described how weed risk assessment in as an effective tool for controlling the spread of invasive species. Prof. Yvonne Buckley, from Trinity College Dublin, then presented her work on the drivers behind the success of exotic species in grasslands, the Nutrient Network (a global collaborative scheme studying grassland ecosystems) and how plant abundance in their native habitat can be used as a predictor of invasiveness. Closing the session (and the symposium), Dr Gerda A. van Uffelen provided some insights from a regional perspective on how to manage (and avoid) invasive species in Europe. The question is: does having a single list for all countries fit the need to prevent invasives, or can a country-tailored approach be more effective? The discussion continues…
Some final observations. On the organization, it would be great if future SOTWP symposia (the next is planned for 25-26 May 2017) could involve participants from outside the boundaries of the room, perhaps by video-conferencing to a wide audience. And with regards to the SOTWP report, it will be interesting to see to what extent it is actually used to identify gaps in botanical research, and therefore priority setting. And not just for crop wild relatives :)
SOTWP Day 1: Climate change, protected areas and extinction risk
In which our friend Nora Castañeda summarizes the first day of the State of the World’s Plants Symposium.
The first day of the Kew symposium was divided in three sessions: climate change, protected areas and extinction risk.
Dr Kay Havens from the Chicago Botanic Gardens opened the first session, presenting some of the responses that plants may display to climate change, such as: plasticity, adaptation and migration. Dr Havens recommended gathering seeds from the fringes of environmental niches, as a strategy to obtain useful adaptations to rapid climate change.
Following this, Dr Alistair Seddon presented his work on the relative response of ecosystems to climate variability. Prof. Sandra Díaz then described the major plant traits (and their combinations) that are currently dominant among plants. This is useful for vegetation and ecosystem modelling. Closing the climate change section, Prof. Yadvinder Malhi presented his research on the impacts of climate change on tropical forests. Did you know that logging can have a similar effect as climate change. You can find a comprehensive summary of Prof. Malhi’s research online.
Dr Iain Darbyshire opened the session on protected areas with his work on Tropical Important Plant Areas, followed by Lize von Staden and the technical approach that the South African National Biodiversity Institute is successfully using to establish in situ conservation priorities. Prof. William Laurance shared some of the considerations that should be taken into account for conserving plant diversity in natural reserves, including where roads and infrastructure should be built, the effectiveness of protected areas to meet their conservation objectives and the importance of connectivity between protected areas in the tropics. He introduced us to PADDDtracker:
We think of national parks and protected areas as permanent fixtures on the landscape, but recent research points to the widespread (but largely overlooked) protected area downgrading, downsizing, and degazettement (PADDD). In response, PADDDtracker.org is documenting the patterns, trends, causes, and consequences of PADDD. PADDDtracker.org allows you to learn about PADDD and share your experiences with the world: where has PADDD already happened? Where has PADDD been proposed? Why is PADDD happening?
The session closed with Diego Juffe-Bignoli from UNEP-WCMC discussing the contributions of protected areas to meeting international biodiversity targets (Aichi, GSPC and SDG).
For the extinction risk session, Prof. Quentin Cronk introduced the term “living dead” to describe those beautiful, large but lonely trees that are often seen in the middle of pastures (common in recently deforested regions). Living outside of their preferred ecological conditions and displaying no regeneration, they have little chance of long-term survival. Prof. Cronk was followed by Prof. David Richardson, who talked about the impacts of invasive plant species on native plant populations.
Then, Steve Bachman, one of the brains behind the Sampled Red List Index for Plants, presented current and future plans for continuing Red Listing plants, current advances in uploading assessments to the IUCN RedList, the need to increase the availability of data for assessing biodiversity threats, and approaches to improving the quality of data derived from citizen science. Prof. Vololoniaina Jeannoda closed the day with her presentation of the ongoing efforts to conserve the oviala — also known as the yams of the forest — in Madagascar. That’s crop wild relatives: more on that on day 2, as you’ll soon see.