Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

September 20, 2017

Go HarvestPlus!

Great to see HarvestPlus, part of the CGIAR Research Program on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health, make it to the semi-finals of the MacArthur Foundation $100 Million Grant Competition.

With a $100 million grant, we would considerably scale up the delivery of biofortified nutritious crops in Africa, transforming the food system and breaking the cycle of nutrition insecurity to leave a lasting legacy for the continent’s future. The grant would allow us to set the stage for reaching 1 billion people globally with these crops by 2030.

There’s an interview with HarvestPlus founder “Howdy” Bouis on their website, explaining the history of the initiatiive. Biofortification is a great illustration of the importance on crop diversity.

September 20, 2017

What will the 2020s be like for crop diversity conservation?

The low level of activity last week on the blog was due to the fact that I was at the Botanic Garden Meise in Belgium participating in the annual meeting organized by the Genebank Platform. You can get a flavour of what happened from Twitter. And yes, I’m sorry, I should have told you all about #genebanks2017 before the meeting, rather than after. My bad.

Anyway, we’re finalizing the Platform’s website and you’ll be able to read all about it there soon. In the meantime, you can see a nice pic of the genebank managers and others working in some of the world’s largest and most used genebanks on the Crop Trust’s Facebook page.

One of those managers is Jean Hanson, and she’ll be retiring from her job at ILRI at the end of the year. In her farewell presentation to the group she summarized the history of plant genetic resources conservation, from the point of view of the international collections, in this way:

1970s: The Decade of Getting Started
1980s: The Decade of Doing
1990s: The Decade of Uncertainty
2000s: The Decade Upgrading
2010s: The Decade of Accounting

Jean didn’t say in her talk what she thought the 2020s were going to be the decade of, but she did share some thoughts during the Q&A. So let me open it up. What do you think? What do the 2020s have in store for the conservation of plant genetic resources for food and agriculture?

September 18, 2017September 18, 2017

Brainfood: Baobab nutrition, New wild cucumber, Strawberry diversity, Sahelian threats, MTAs, CC & yields

Nutritional variation in baobab (Adansonia digitata L.) fruit pulp and seeds based on Africa geographical regions. Malawi has the most nutritious types.
A valid name for the Xishuangbanna gourd, a cucumber with carotene-rich fruits. Cucumis sativus L. var. xishuangbannanensis Qi & Yuan ex S.S.Renner, var. nov., if you must know.
Population genetic analysis of a global collection of Fragaria vesca using microsatellite markers. The Icelandic are different from the other European populatons.
Spatially explicit multi-threat assessment of food tree species in Burkina Faso: A fine-scale approach. All species threatened everywhere, but especially by climate change.
Use and Misuse of Material Transfer Agreements: Lessons in Proportionality from Research, Repositories, and Litigation. Horses for courses.
Temperature increase reduces global yields of major crops in four independent estimates. “Without CO2 fertilization, effective adaptation, and genetic improvement, each degree-Celsius increase in global mean temperature would, on average, reduce global yields of wheat by 6.0%, rice by 3.2%, maize by 7.4%, and soybean by 3.1%.”

September 14, 2017

Breeding tomorrow’s heirlooms

Interesting article in Modern Farmer, on Why We Need to Revitalize Organic Seed Farming. They rounded up the usual suspects, who offer the expected explanations, none of which detracts from the importance of what some breeders are doing.

“The heirloom boom of the nineties helped people see the value of preserving seed, but they don’t understand that it can get even better,” says Selman. “Public plant breeders are creating varieties that are more resilient and more appropriate for the future.”

Lane Selman talked to me about her work with the Culinary Breeding Network for Eat This Podcast.

September 11, 2017February 8, 2018

Brainfood: Eggplant germplasm, CC threat, Impact metrics, Drought & seeds, Burundi cattle, Wild chickpea, Banana collecting, Bambara groundnut diversity, CIP cryo, USA PGR policy, Australian forages, ILRI seed testing, Nepal intensification, Maize and CC

World Vegetable Center Eggplant Collection: Origin, Composition, Seed Dissemination and Utilization in Breeding. 3,200 accessions from 90 countries, covering all 3 cultivated species, but not enough wild relatives.
An integrated framework to identify wildlife populations under threat from climate change. Need to know about landscape connectivity, and genomic data would be useful too.
Research impact: a narrative review. There are lots of methods, and the indirect ones are sometimes the best.
Orthodox seeds and resurrection plants: two of a kind? Resurrection plants have reactivated the ancient seed drought tolerance program in vegetative tissues.
Effect of genetic European taurine ancestry on milk yield of Ankole-Holstein crossbred dairy cattle in mixed smallholders system of Burundi highlands. European ancestry good for milk yield.
First insights into the biochemical and molecular response to cold stress in Cicer microphyllum, a crop wild relative of chickpea (Cicer arietinum). High altitude Himalayan species found to have frost tolerance.
Banana Collecting Mission in the Autonomous Region Of Bougainville (AROB), Papua New Guinea. 13 days, 61 accessions. Hard work.
Morphological Characterisation of Selected African Accessions of Bambara Groundnut (Vigna subterranea (L.) Verdc.). 3 out of 300 out of 1973 have high yield potential. Hard work.
A large-scale viability assessment of the potato cryobank at the International Potato Center (CIP). They’re getting better at it. Hard work.
Deep Seeded Problems: A Look At Seed Bank Regulations. The USA should engage internationally on crop diversity conservation. Hard work.
Australian Pastures Genebank – Temperate Species Regeneration. Hard work.
Medium-term seed storage of 50 genera of forage legumes and evidence-based genebank monitoring intervals. Hard seeds are hard work.
Agricultural Land Use Intensity and Determinants in Different Agroecological Regions in Central Nepal Himalaya. Location, location, location.
Maize Diversity and Climate Change. To investigate the local adaptation of landraces, which you need for adaptation to climate change, you need the synergy that comes from genomics and phenomics in coordinated fashion.