- Long-Term Evidence Shows that Crop-Rotation Diversification Increases Agricultural Resilience to Adverse Growing Conditions in North America. Meaning higher maize yields in droughts.
- Gene banks for wild and cultivated sunflower genetic resources. Details from the US, France and Serbia, summary info from Argentina, Bulgaria, Germany, India, Romania, Russia, Spain. Reference genomes and high throughput phenotyping for the wild relatives on the horizon.
- Evaluation and identification of wild lentil accessions for enhancing genetic gains of cultivated varieties. About 10% of 96 wild lentil accessions conserved in India are good for something.
- Genetic structure of Iranian indigenous sheep breeds: insights for conservation. 8 breeds should be the focus of conservation efforts, as the trend is towards homogenization.
- CRISPR-mediated accelerated domestication of African rice landraces. Started with well-known African sativa landrace Kabre and messed with total of 4 loci for plant height, seed size and yield, resulting in mutants with better grain yield.
- Farmers’ Preferences for Genetic Resources of Kersting’s Groundnut [Macrotyloma geocarpum (Harms) Maréchal and Baudet] in the Production Systems of Burkina Faso and Ghana. They depend on the ethnic group.
- Genotyping-By-Sequencing Reveals Population Structure and Genetic Diversity of a Buffelgrass (Cenchrus ciliaris L.) Collection. Structure in the ILRI collection is not straightforwardly geographical. My guess is that rainfall is involved. Oh, and we have a core collection now.
- Improved feeding and forages at a crossroads: Farming systems approaches for sustainable livestock development in East Africa. We need the above, and more, at scale.
- A foundation monograph of Ipomoea (Convolvulaceae) in the New World. 425 spp, many of them, in different clades, with storage roots, and little known.
- Morpho-Physiological and Genomic Evaluation of Juglans Species Reveals Regional Maladaptation to Cold Stress. Gonna need a bigger collection.
- Declining biodiversity for food and agriculture needs urgent global action. The The State of the World’s Biodiversity for Food and Agriculture summarized: it’s essential, it’s declining, we’re not doing enough.
- Rethink the expansion of access and benefit sharing. Just maybe this is a/the reason?
Questioning the questioners
Farmer input is essential to tackling global challenges of climate change, rural poverty and nutrition. A new data collection tool aims to build the biggest open-access dataset of its kind for development and research.
That sounds great. Nice to see, in particular, clusters of survey questions on dietary diversity and wild foods.
But where are the questions on intraspecific crop diversity? Surely it’s interesting to ask farmers how many different landraces/varieties of each crop they grow? Am I missing something among the over 700 questions?
Ok, there’s an additional module on adoption of modern varieties. But is that really enough? Looking forward to hearing from my friends at the Alliance.
Brainfood: Gap analysis, Faba re-collecting, Selfing, Perennials, Seed longevity, QMS, Fish cryo, Chicken domestication, Wheat evolution, Crossing over, Heat stress, Spinach, Mungbean, Wild chickpea, Satoyama
- A gap analysis modelling framework to prioritize collecting for ex situ conservation of crop landraces. Kinda proud it only took me 30 years to get this done. For comparison, this is where we were 15 years ago. Seems like a lifetime. Well, a career.
- Serendipitous In Situ Conservation of Faba Bean Landraces in Tunisia: A Case Study. Comparison between newly collected and genebank materials reveals overlap. The above is thus unnecessary. Life comes at you fast.
- Why Self-fertilizing Plants Still Exist in Wild Populations: Diversity Assurance through Stress-Induced Male Sterility May Promote Selective Outcrossing and Recombination. Stress makes plants incels.
- Roadmap for Accelerated Domestication of an Emerging Perennial Grain Crop. Instead of making wheat perennial, make a perennial wild relative of wheat domesticated.
- An SNP based GWAS analysis of seed longevity in wheat. Could increase seed longevity by just over 10%. Hardly seems worth it.
- Quality Management Practices of Gene Banks for Livestock: A Global Review. 30% of 90 genebanks have a QMS, 15 involving formal certification, but mainly for material entering, not leaving.
- Cryopreservation of fish gametes: A remarkable tool for breeding conservation. No doubt QMS coming soon.
- The wild species genome ancestry of domestic chickens. Not just Red Junglefowl, Charles.
- Genome‐wide sequence information reveals recurrent hybridization among diploid wheat wild relatives. Kinda like chickens? No, not really, but almost.
- Molecular and genetic bases of heat stress responses in crop plants and breeding for increased resilience and productivity. We’re this close. This close to a breakthrough, I tell you.
- A review on the genetic resources, domestication and breeding history of spinach (Spinacia oleracea L.). Gonna need more wild relatives.
- Mungbean Genetic Resources and Utilization. Gonna need more wild relatives.
- Population genetic variability and distribution of the endangered Greek endemic Cicer graecum under climate change scenarios. Serendipity has its limits.
- Counting on Crossovers: Controlled Recombination for Plant Breeding. Increasing recombination could be especially useful when doing crosses with wild relatives (see above).
- Nature-oriented park use of satoyama ecosystems can enhance biodiversity conservation in urbanized landscapes. Abandoned satoyama can still do some good.
How many rice varieties are there in India?
Prior to the green revolution in the 1960s, India was home to more than 100,000 rice varieties, encompassing a stunning diversity in taste, nutrition, pest-resistance and, crucially in this age of climate change and natural disasters, adaptability to a range of conditions.
Ok, I’ll bite. That’s from a recent blog post from UNEP. Let’s assume that what they mean by “varieties” is farmers’ landraces. How do they know how many there are?
Fortunately, there’s a link in the post, which takes you to a 2009 piece by Dr Debal Deb, from the Centre for Interdisciplinary Studies, India.
Until the advent of the Green Revolution in the 1960s, India was believed to have been home to about 110,000 rice varieties (Richharia and Govindasamy 1990), most of which have gone extinct from farm fields. Perhaps a few thousand varieties are still surviving on marginal farms, where no modern cultivar can grow. In the eastern state of West Bengal, about 5600 rice varieties were cultivated, of which 3500 varieties of rice were shipped to the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) of the Philippines during the period from 1975 to 1983 (Deb 2005). After an extensive search over the past fourteen years for extant rice varieties in West Bengal and a few neighboring states, I was able to rescue only 610 rice landraces from marginal farms. All others–about 5000–have disappeared from farm fields. The 610 extant rice varieties are grown every year on my conservation farm, Basudha. Every year, these seeds are distributed to willing farmers from the Vrihi seed bank free of charge.
Ok, so we’ve gone from “was home” to “was believed to have been home.” “Richharia and Govindasamy 1990” is Rices of India, by R.H. Richharia and S. Govindasamy, published by the Academy of Development Science, Karjat. I couldn’t find it online, though it’s cited a few times on Google Scholar, but Dr Deb does provides a helpful note:
The only reliable data are given in Richharia and Govindasamy (1990), who estimated that about 200,000 varieties existed in India until the advent of the Green Revolution. Assuming many of these folk varieties were synonymous, an estimated 110,000 varieties were in cultivation. Such astounding figures win credibility from the fact that Dr. Richharia collected 22,000 folk varieties (currently in custody of Raipur University) from Chhattisgarh alone – one of the 28 States of India. ((FAO (2003) Genetic diversity in rice. In: Sustainable rice production for food security. International Rice Commission/ FAO. Rome. (web publication).))
Ah, so it was actually 200,000, but 110,000 after you account, somehow or other, for synonyms. If you want another data point, this is what that FAO publication quoted at the end said about numbers of varieties, though for Asia as a whole:
The quality preferences of rice consumers have resulted in a wide diversity of varieties specific to different localities. Although the exact diversity cannot be gauged, it is estimated to be around 140,000 different genotypes.
But there’s more. The recently retired head of the IRRI genebank, Dr Ruaraidh Sackville Hamilton, had this to say in 2006:
The M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation in India claims that India alone has 100,000 traditional varieties still in use by farmers around the country, and another 300,000 that have become extinct… India’s 100,000 may be an overestimate, but, even if it is, it’s probably not too wildly out. If the small Southeast Asian countries each have 10,000, India could easily have more than 50,000.
But note that’s 100,000 varieties in use now, not “until the advent of the Green Revolution.”
So which is it? How many rice varieties are there in India? Don’t get me wrong, I’d really like to know. I just don’t think we can, at least just now. What we can be fairly confident about, though, is the number of samples in genebanks. For example, IRRI has 16,746 rice accessions from India. NBPGR, India’s national genebank, has 86,011. Oh look, that makes about 100,000.
LATER: I don’t want to spoil the story, but I just remembered that Bob Rhoades estimated there were once 30,000 rice traditional varieties in India.
Genetic diversity indicators go wild
A little follow-up on my post from a few days back on the post-2020 biodiversity framework. A letter to Science suggests that the genetic level of variation is being neglected, in particular for wild species.
The post-2020 framework should explicitly commit to maintaining genetic diversity within all species and to implementing strategies to halt genetic erosion and preserve adaptive potential of populations of both wild and domesticated species. The framework should also define indicators of progress toward this goal. Such indicators could include collecting data on the number of species, populations, or metapopulations that are large enough to maintain genetic diversity as well as those that are not. A widely used measure in this context is the “genetically effective population size,” which quantifies the rate at which a population loses genetic variation. When the effective size is measured as 500 “ideal individuals,” the population is considered “genetically safe.” We therefore suggest monitoring the number of populations above and below the genetically effective size of 500. The effective size is assessed from genetic or demographic data and is usually much lower — by about an order of magnitude — than the total number of mature individuals. Another indicator could be the number of species or populations in which genetic diversity is being monitored by national agencies or universities using DNA-markers. A third indicator could be measuring rates of loss of distinct populations within species.
Interesting to see that the crop diversity conservation community is slightly ahead of the curve on this.