Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

August 11, 2017August 11, 2017

Composite provenancing for crops too?

I completely missed an interesting blog post by Prof. Andy Lowe of the University of Adelaide when it came out a couple of years ago. “Local is not always best” updates a paper in a previous article ((Lowe AJ (2010) Composite provenancing of seed for restoration: progressing the ‘local is best’ paradigm for seed sourcing. In: The State of Australia’s Birds 2009: Restoring Woodland Habitats for Birds. (Eds David Paton and James O’Conner). Supplement to Wingspan 20(1) pp 16-17.)) on where you should get your seeds from for habitat restoration projects. In summary, the answer is: not all from one, nearby place.

To simulate the natural mixing of genes during a restoration programme, it would be necessary to restore populations using a mixture of material sampled at different distances from the focal site, a practise defined as composite provenancing. This ‘composite provenance’ would be predominantly composed of locally sourced material, taken from genetically healthy stock, but would also incorporate local and ecogeographically matched sources. In addition, a smaller proportion of material, depending on the natural gene flow dynamics of the focal species (but usually somewhere between 10 and 30%), should be comprised of material from much further a field.

Though Prof. Lowe deals with wild species in his paper and blog post, I think “composite provenancing” is also be relevant for crops. Sometimes, too much is made of “genetic integrity” and localism.

August 8, 2017August 7, 2017

Low throughput phenotyping

A new breeding selection criterion for me: football bounce in turf breeding programme, Nanjing Inst Botany, Jiangsu https://t.co/1TDdXekCWo

— Pat Heslop-Harrison (@Pathh1) August 7, 2017

The first national botanical garden in China, apparently.

August 7, 2017August 7, 2017

Brainfood: Mycorrhizal diversity, Olive diversity, Teak diversity, Core software diversity, Cost-benefit, Frosty rye, CGIAR future, Portuguese beans, Improvement networks, Food sovereignty

Historical biome distribution and recent human disturbance shape the diversity of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi. Proximity to tropical grasslands during the last glacial maximum makes for a large potential species pool, remoteness from human disturbance for the presence of a high percentage of that pool.
The First Molecular Identification of an Olive Collection Applying Standard Simple Sequence Repeats and Novel Expressed Sequence Tag Markers. 59 genotypes among 370 trees.
Worldwide translocation of teak—origin of landraces and present genetic base. The dryer part of the natural range has not really been used in plantations.
GenoCore: A simple and fast algorithm for core subset selection from large genotype datasets. Better than MSTRAT, Core Hunter, and random sampling.
Global economic trade-offs between wild nature and tropical agriculture. We can go ahead and cut down the Atlantic Forest. Wait, what?
Exploring new alleles for frost tolerance in winter rye. Basically one allele, actually.
Reforming the research policy and impact culture in the CGIAR: Integrating science and systemic capacity development. Let CGIAR be CGIAR.
Improving global integration of crop research. Taking this to the next level. Which sounded a lot like the International Treaty’s Global Information System on PGRFA. Also, see above.
Establishing the Bases for Introducing the Unexplored Portuguese Common Bean Germplasm into the Breeding World. 37 accessions had 100% of the diversity of 175 accessions, which were mainly hybrids between the two main genepools. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that before.
Plant diversity increases with the strength of negative density dependence at the global scale. Janzen-Connell were right, it’s natural enemies that explain the tropical-temperate diversity pattern. With video goodness.
Local food sovereignty for global food security? Highlighting interplay challenges. “…scaling up of food sovereignty will not necessarily lead to wider sustainability and food security outcomes.”

August 4, 2017

Wait, what?

August 2, 2017

Xylella spreads shock

A few days ago the European Commission published its “List of demarcated areas established in the Union territory for the presence of Xylella fastidiosa as referred to in Article 4(1) of Decision (EU) 2015/789” and the news is not good for Corsica, the Balearics and assorted other areas.

A good summary of the story ((Which we’ve blogged about a couple of times here.)) so far, and what’s in store for us, can be found on Small Things Considered in the form of a translation from the Catalan of a blog post by Mercè Piqueras.

A conference on European research into Xylella fastidiosa is to be held in Palma de Mallorca, in the Balearic Islands, in 13-15 November 2017. Experts on Xylella from Europe and other parts of the world will participate in the meeting. These include Alexander Purcell, Rodrigo Almeida and Mathieu Vanhove, from the University of California-Berkeley, Carlos Chacón, from the University of Costa Rica, and Helvecio De La Coletta-Filho, from the Instituto Agranomico-Centro de Citricultura, Brazil.

Meanwhile, nurseries are mounting their own private Brexit.