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Lethal yellowing spreads in West Africa

Readers may remember our recent post on the threat to the international coconut collection in Papua New Guinea that is being posed by a new disease. Now it looks like an old disease, lethal yellowing, is likewise making strides towards another important international coconut genebank, that in Cote d’Ivoire…

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…quite apart from affecting the livelihoods of an increasing number of farmers who can hardly afford the hit. See the video by Rouland Bourdeix for more details.

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Featured: Agroecology

Geoff Gurr takes issue with what he interprets as our sarcasm:

The ‘no, really’ comment could be taken as suggesting that there is no great surprise contained in the title ‘…crop diversification promotes ecological intensification of agriculture’. In fact, the idea that ecological approaches such as crop diversification can have the types of beneficial effects that we report is often challenged. Had word counts allowed our title to be longer we’d have liked to have extended it to say something like ‘to the extent that the need for synthetic inputs was reduced by two thirds whilst increasing crop yield’.

Though actually what we were trying to do is point out that his results reinforce those of other papers in this week’s Brainfood.

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Brainfood: Oxygen and seeds, Chicken inbreeding, Non-IPR seed laws, Biodiversity & farm management, Soil agrobiodiversity, Biodiversity & plant protection double, Genebank conservation value, Dichotomies

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The long and winding road to crop wild relative conservation priorities

Those who follow these things will probably have noticed a certain frisson in the press over a paper in Nature Plants on setting conservation priorities for crop wild relatives. Lead authors are Nora Castañeda and Colin Khoury of CIAT, both of whom have featured here before. Good to see Nora celebrating the occasion on Twitter. She really deserves that beer.

Well, I think it’s a beer.

Anyway, I won’t go into the details of the findings here. As I say, it’s all over the news (well, relatively speaking), and you can always explore the results for yourself on the project’s website. But I did want to strike a historical note.

This whole thing started when a small group of us decided it would be kinda fun to apply fancy spatial analysis methods to data from herbaria and genebanks on the distribution of wild Phaseolus species in the Americas. Just to see if it could be done. And whether the results would make any sense.

Conservation priorities for wild beans

Well, it could, and they sort of did. And many years, a major international project, two PhDs and a lot of blood, sweat and tears later, we have a global analysis across dozens of genepools and hundreds of species. It was totally worth it, but there should be easier, faster and less expensive ways to get this kind of thing done.