- Berry-go-Round 6, a plant-based blog carnival, is up. Jeremy says: “Taxonomy! Yay!“
- US uproots sugarcane, Kenya plants it. “Deciding who is right is difficult.” Er, you betcha.
- California’s largest cash crop can be an environmental disaster.
- Cassava not as nasty as its wild relatives.
Nibbles: Maize squared, Urban Ag, Traditional farming, Rice, Extension, Training, Pine nuts, Beer, Markets
- More on ancient maize. Old popcorn contains interesting DNA diversity.
- How teosinte became maize.
- Urban Harvest has a new web site. Via.
- Khadin cultivation system contributes to sustainability in Rajasthan.
- Vietnamese farmers helping their African brethren grow rice.
- Agricultural development officer delivers training on village-level seed management, then hands out improved seed.
- Former student waxes lyrical about UP Los Baños.
- Pine nuts.
- Brewing medieval and modern juxtaposed.
- Working out fair trade.
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.
Nibbles: Maize, Climate change, Erosion (not), Bees squared, Cordyceps, Apples, City gardens
- Maize origins investigated.
- Plants climb mountains.
- Rice endures, too.
- “How would our federal government respond if 1 out of every 3 cows was dying?“
- Bees in trouble in India too, but maybe not for same reason.
- We’ve blogged about 冬虫å¤è‰ before, but I personally can never get enough of the stuff.
- Apple breeding bears fruit in India.
- Videos of urban agriculture in Washington DC. Via.
Nibbles: Bananas, Wheat, Cameroon, Bees, Eden, Millennium Villages, Organic, Yam, Ag origins, Apricots
- Compare and contrast the banana and the Big Mac. Dan Koeppel takes it to the masses.
- Lamenting the loss of “amber waves of grain”. Ingrate.
- Cameroon’s agriculture vulnerable to climate change. I’ll alert the media.
- Look what I got you for National Pollinator Week next week; a World Checklist of Bees. Neat-o.
- Celebrate food and farmers in Eden.
- “The core of the strategy is a short-term provision of improved seeds suited to the local environment and fertilizers like Di-Ammonium Phosphate (DAP) and urea accompanied by advice on how to use them.” Sounds familiar…
- Meanwhile, in non-Millennium Villages: “While his maize cobs were smaller than others, the seed was of a much higher quality; the fibre of his cotton was also much longer.”
- Japanese yam fields in peril. Yams as in Dioscorea or sweet potato or what? So annoying.
- Neolithic myths?
- California apricot grower explores Central Asia, comes up trumps. Jeremy comments: CandyCots? I think I want to be sick.