Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

April 4, 2017April 4, 2017

This is what’s threatening crops around the world

Readers with a long memory will remember the Global Crop Loss Survey, which we blogged about here back in November. Just to remind everyone else:

Over a period of three months (November 2016 – January 2017), 1142 responses from 216 respondents in 67 countries were recorded during the Global Crop Loss Survey organized by the Crop Loss Subject Matter Committee of the ISPP [International Congress of Plant Pathology]. This appears to be the first Survey of this kind ever conducted.

Well, some preliminary results are out.

At this stage, a key question concerns the overall representativeness of the information gathered. Across all five crops, experts have reported losses lower than 1% in 15.4% of the cases, between 1 and 5% in 37.3% of the cases, between 5 and 20% in 33.7% of the cases, between 20 and 60% in 11.5% of the cases, and higher than 60% in 2.1% of the cases. A simple aggregate weighted average of these losses, in which loss levels are weighted by their reported frequencies, gives an overall crop loss of 11.7%. This figure would represent the average loss caused by an average disease (or pest), (1) when occurring, and (2) in the absence of any other disease or pest. Although a preliminary result, the estimated average loss is well within the ranges of global or regional crop losses that have been reported in the literature.

The money table is this:

Would be interesting to compare these data with the investment being made in breeding against, and indeed in germplasm evaluation by genebanks for, different threats. Analysis is continuing…

April 4, 2017April 4, 2017

Take the AnGR survey, if you dare

Do you hold an animal germplasm (biological samples of reproductive material such as semen, embryos, etc.) or genomic collection (DNA, blood, tissue, etc.)?

Then you probably want to take part in the Global Genetic Collection Survey for Animal Genetic Resources. Open until 24 April.

April 4, 2017April 4, 2017

Plants of the World Online is online

Great to see the launch of Kew’s Plants of the World Online portal.

In 2015, the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew launched its first Science Strategy establishing its vision to document and understand global plant and fungal diversity and their uses, bringing authoritative expertise to bear on the critical challenges facing humanity today. The Science Strategy also committed Kew to delivering nine strategic outputs with the overarching aim to disseminate Kew’s scientific knowledge of plants and fungi to maximize its impact in science, education, conservation policy and management. The Plants of the World Online portal (POWO), is one of the nine strategic outputs and its aim is to enable users to access information on all the world’s known seed-bearing plants by 2020…

…Ultimately, POWO will become a single point of access for authoritative plant species information, a multi-dimensional catalogue of plant life, including information on identification, distribution, traits, conservation, molecular phylogenies and uses. The codebase is open source and Kew hopes to support existing partner networks to set up their own portals, creating a distributed network of botanical data hubs. POWO aims to become a resource that has global coverage which can empower and inform citizens, policy makers, conservationists and farmers everywhere, about the importance of plants and fungi to life. In addition, a key function of POWO is to ensure that Kew’s floristic data can be harvested and ingested by the World Flora Online (WFO) portal enabling Kew to support the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation (GSPC) Target 1 2020.

And speaking of harvesting and ingesting, it even has crops! As it develops, I do hope it will include links to genebank and botanical garden collections.

Oh, and since I’m on Kew, don’t forget this year’s State of the World’s Plants Symposium is coming up. Last year there was a section on crop wild relatives. Nothing so agricultural on this occasion, but lots of interesting topics nevertheless.

April 3, 2017April 10, 2017

Never rains but it pours, genebank edition

If running the genebank at the John Innes Institute in the UK is too tame for you, why not check out the job at WorldVeg:

WorldVeg is seeking a highly motivated and experienced Genebank Manager to manage the conservation of the Center’s vegetable germplasm, to lead and conduct research on vegetable genetic resources of both global and traditional crops in collaboration with WorldVeg scientists and partners around the world to assure the safety and duplication of the collection, and to ensure the genetic resources are utilized effectively to benefit the poor in developing countries.

You’d also get to play around with a nifty demonstration garden.

April 3, 2017April 10, 2017

Brainfood: Banana identification, Donkey domestication, Mouse domestication, African cattle, Pig domestication, Biofuels, Biofortification, Genomics for breeding, Species movement, Crop diversity double, N fixation, Ag commercialization models, Wild beans, Brassica domestication, Teaching biodiversity

Molecular and cytological characterization of the global Musa germplasm collection provides insights into the treasure of banana diversity. 16% of 1500 accessions need taxonomic verification. Could have been much worse.
Why the Donkey Did Not Go South: Disease as a Constraint on the Spread of Equus asinus into Southern Africa. Gap in distribution between Kenya and southern Africa until colonial times probably down to trypanosomiasis.
Origins of house mice in ecological niches created by settled hunter-gatherers in the Levant 15,000 y ago. Hunter gatherers inadvertently domesticated the mouse.
The genome landscape of indigenous African cattle. Now we know where the genes for heat tolerance and tick resistance can be found, and it’s where you’d think.
Insights into early pig domestication provided by ancient DNA analysis. In northern Europe, around 4000 BC, people started crossing pigs from the south with local wild boars. What were they thinking?
Recent grassland losses are concentrated around U.S. ethanol refineries. The revenge of geography.
Provitamin A biofortification of crop plants: a gold rush with many miners. “One crucial aspect that needs further experimentation is whether β-carotene-fortified crops can improve vitamin A status in the main targets of the biofortification efforts, that is, malnourished adults and children.” Just going to leave that out there.
Genomic innovation for crop improvement. Longer reads needed. Is there no satisfying these gene-jockeys?
Biodiversity redistribution under climate change: Impacts on ecosystems and human well-being. Species movements affect ecosystem functioning and service provision: “The indirect effects of climate change on food webs are also expected to compound the direct effects on crops.”
Feeding the Household, Growing the Business, or Just Showing Off? Farmers’ Motivations for Crop Diversity Choices in Papua New Guinea. Some people grow lots of crops because it’s cool. But why wasn’t this done at the intraspecific level?
To Specialize or Diversify: Agricultural Diversity and Poverty Dynamics in Ethiopia. Forget coolness, crop diversity makes you less poor.
Biogeography of nodulated legumes and their nitrogen-fixing symbionts. Australia is weird.
Plantations, outgrowers and commercial farming in Africa: agricultural commercialisation and implications for agrarian change. They all have their place.
Genomic history of the origin and domestication of common bean unveils its closest sister species. Wild populations from northern Peru and Ecuador are not derived from wild Phaseolus vulgaris which migrated there from Mesoamerica but are actually a different species which predates the evolution of wild common bean.
Genomic inferences of domestication events are corroborated by written records in Brassica rapa. Five genetic groups, with rapini at the base.
Walking and talking the tree of life: Why and how to teach about biodiversity. Forget ranks, try clades.