Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

September 27, 2017September 27, 2017

Agricultural biodiversity wades into the mainstream at long last

I really haven’t done sufficient justice to the new book from Bioversity, Mainstreaming Agrobiodiversity in Sustainable Food Systems: Scientific Foundations for an Agrobiodiversity Index, whose moving dedication I reproduce above. It’s a great review of the diverse reasons why agricultural diversity is important to us. But also of the complexities involved in translating diversity in farmers’ fields, let alone in genebanks, into development outcomes like better nutrition, as clearly shown by the diagram below.

September 27, 2017September 27, 2017

Botanical gardens need to look to the tropics

A monumental study of the plant species conserved in botanical gardens has just been published, and is getting quite a lot of traction in the media. The headline numbers are impressive: “botanic gardens manage at least 105,634 species, equating to 30% of all plant species diversity, and conserve over 41% of known threatened species.” It is worrying, however, that three quarters of the species that are absent from botanical gardens collections are tropical in origin. Lots of hot, sweaty work still do be done.

September 25, 2017September 26, 2017

Brainfood: Pennisetum genome, Dioscorea genome, CBS timeline, Global taro, Science storytelling, Fragmented populations, Beet diversity, Potato diversity, Norwegian chickens, Med holidays, ABS, Jatropha diversity, Better olive oil

Pearl millet genome sequence provides a resource to improve agronomic traits in arid environments. Of course it does. Lots of genes for natural wax proteins may be part of the answer.
Genome sequencing of the staple food crop white Guinea yam enables the development of a molecular marker for sex determination. Which should make breeding more efficient.
Cassava brown streak disease: historical timeline, current knowledge and future prospects. Re-emergence drives intense scientific scrutiny, and maybe some solutions, including 25 best-bet clones from the region which show foliar symptoms but no tuber necrosis.
Adapting clonally propagated crops to climatic changes: a global approach for taro (Colocasia esculenta (L.) Schott). People need taro diversity.
Opinion: Finding the plot in science storytelling in hopes of enhancing science communication. See all of the above.
Call for a Paradigm Shift in the Genetic Management of Fragmented Populations. Mix it up!
How scattered trees matter for biodiversity conservation in active pastures. By being diverse, and helping in forest recovery. Someone should mash up with the previous.
Insights into the genetic relationships among plants of Beta section Beta using SNP markers. Fancy markers say same thing as less fancy markers.
Levels of Intra-Specific AFLP diversity in Tuber-Bearing Potato Species with Different Breeding Systems and Ploidy Levels. One plant is enough for self-compatible species.
Genetic diversity in five chicken lines from the Norwegian live poultry gene bank. Not much, globally speaking. But that’s not the whole point.
Is It Still Necessary to Continue to Collect Crop Genetic Resources in the Mediterranean Area? A Case Study in Catalonia. Yes.
Beyond access and benefit-sharing : lessons from the emergence and application of the principle of fair and equitable benefit-sharing in agrobiodiversity governance. It’s not yet working, maybe because it’s too complicated.
Genetic Tracing of Jatropha curcas L. from Its Mesoamerican Origin to the World. Now we know where to go look for fixes to the low productivity problem of African and Asian material, which is all derived from a couple of accessions.
Exploration of genetic resources to improve the functional quality of virgin olive oil. We need data on phenolic composition.

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?