Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

October 22, 2012

Featured: Barley domestication

Ian Dawson has a bone to pick with the authors of a study on barley domestication which we included in a recent Brainfood:

The main point is… properly geo-referenced samples give so much more insight in a paper such as this…

The original paper is in PNAS: “Tibet is one of the centers of domestication of cultivated barley.” So maybe it isn’t after all? Let the debate begin.

October 22, 2012June 11, 2013

Brainfood: Biodiversity surveys, Potato innovation, Wild sorghum, Bumblebee decline, Naked barley, Primate deterrents, Pastoralism, Mapping, Japanese forests, Aquaculture, Birds, Lentil mixtures, Eucalypt plantations, Seed adoption, Altai nomadism, Dung beetle diversity

Systematic, large-scale national biodiversity surveys: NeoMaps as a model for tropical regions. The Neotropical Biodiversity Mapping Initiative (NeoMaps) provides good estimates of species richness, composition and relative abundance, in about 1 month of fieldwork per major taxonomic group and about US$ 1–8 per sq km. Now to do something similar for crop diversity.
Insights into potato innovation systems in Bolivia, Ethiopia, Peru and Uganda. Rapid appraisal of potato innovation system by CIP et al. reveals differences among countries, but significant role of CIP across countries. Roles of farmer organizations and input supply companies limited everywhere.
Population genetic structure of in situ wild Sorghum bicolor in its Ethiopian center of origin based on SSR markers. Significant differentiation among populations, despite long-distance seed movement and introgression.
Assessing declines of North American bumble bees (Bombus spp.) using museum specimens. Half of the species are declining.
Is naked barley an eastern or a western crop? The combined evidence of archaeobotany and genetics. Well, it used to be western too, up to the Bronze Age. Now mainly eastern.
Crop protection and conflict mitigation: reducing the costs of living alongside non-human primates. A diversity of strategies for coping with malevolent biodiversity.
Conserving biodiversity in a changing world: land use change and species richness in northern Tanzania. But, would you know it, pastoral grazing threatens other mammals.
Mapping from heterogeneous biodiversity monitoring data sources. Could be interesting when folks get around to mapping agricultural biodiversity by smart phone.
Sustainable management of planted landscapes: lessons from Japan. They planted trees, then neglected them because imports were cheaper, and now they’re paying some kind of price.
Aquaculture: a newly emergent food production sector—and perspectives of its impacts on biodiversity and conservation. Mixed …
Protection strategies for farmland birds in legume–grass leys as trade-offs between nature conservation and farmers’ needs. Cut high for succesful skylark nests with minimal impact on milk.
Optimizing lentil-based mixed cropping with different companion crops and plant densities in terms of crop yield and weed control. Mixtures might be better, especially with wheat and barley.
Role of eucalypt and other planted forests in biodiversity conservation and the provision of biodiversity-related ecosystem services. They can provide an opportunity for forest restoration, but it will take some rethinking. The mother-in-law will be pleased.
Influence of Sources of Seed on Varietal Adoption Behavior of Wheat Farmers in Indo-Gangetic Plains of India. You need to get the message out if you want your improved varieties adopted. Can’t imagine you’d need a multinomial logit model to figure that out.
Pastoral nomadism in the forest-steppe of the Mongolian Altai under a changing economy and a warming climate. As transport costs go up, and goat numbers increase because of cash from cashmere, mobility decreases and overgrazing results. A traditional way of life becoming unsustainable before your eyes.
Species-rich dung beetle communities buffer ecosystem services in perturbed agro-ecosystems. Functional redundancy is not redundant after all.

October 19, 2012January 30, 2013

Do we need an archive of cluster diagrams?

Roderic Page has a perceptive, amusing rant over at iPhylo today on why people who come up with phylogenetic trees or cluster diagrams, say as a result of a fancy molecular study, don’t routinely archive them in TreeBASE. His answer is threefold:

1. It is not at all obvious that databasing trees is useful
2. The databases we have suck
3. There’s no obvious incentive for the people producing trees to database them

Having spent an hour or so with TreeBASE trying to get the diagram for cultivated sorghum reproduced here, I can certainly sympathize with point number 2. I can’t say much about “the underlying data model, the choice of programming language, the use of a Java applet to display trees” or “the voluminous XML output”, but “the Byzantine search interface” certainly contributes to TreeBASE being “a bag of hurt.”

And yet I’m not so sure about Dr Page’s point number 1. I have a feeling that a way of storing and comparing diagrams illustrating the genetic relationships among genebank accessions or the wild relatives of a crop (including genepool concepts) might well be welcome in the agrobiodiversity community. Which would render point 3 moot. At least if it wasn’t TreeBASE. But don’t let me speak on your behalf. If you have a strong opinion, one way or another, leave us a comment.

LATER: If not TreeBASE, then perhaps OneZoom?

October 18, 2012

Biotechnological success stories sought

Do you have examples of

…high impact and/or teachable instances where non-GMO agricultural biotechnologies are, and have been, used to serve the needs of smallholder farmers in developing countries in the crop, forestry, livestock and fisheries sectors.

If so, you might like to know that

FAO is opening a competition to identify … five case studies and the writers that will document them. The selected authors will each receive a small honorarium and will have their authorship reflected on the publication.

The publication being “Case Studies of use of Agricultural Biotechnologies in Developing Countries”, which is intended as a follow-up to FAO’s 2010 International Conference on Agricultural Biotechnologies in Developing Countries. The target audience is non-technical, and the term biotechnology covers a multitude of sins.

Read all the details. Good luck!

October 17, 2012

Keeping an eye on the big playas

To find out what mainstream agriculture is up to, you have to follow mainstream media outlets, and some of those are behind a paywall much of the time. ¹ So I’m glad that both Kay McDonald at Big Picture Agriculture and Thomas Barnett at Globlogization subscribe to the Wall Street Journal. From Big Picture Agriculture we learn that yesterday, World Food Day, the WSJ devoted a lot of space to Innovations in Agriculture. There’s a lot there to pore over. And both Kay and Tom go large on the WSJ’s report on no-till farming, largely as a response to high energy costs.

Also for World Food Day, Kay shares this little insight into professional doomsayers:

Lester Brown must be astonished that there are 130 million fewer hungry people now than there were 20 years ago even though we have over 1.5 billion more people to feed. But, undaunted, this week he continues to warn that we will soon be running out of food. One of these years he’ll be right, but I doubt that it’ll be this next year. His logic makes sense and grabs headlines around the world’s leading news publications except he lacks one element in his analysis and that is the economics of supply and demand for food production. Food commodity prices are high right now and the whole world is responding, anxious to cash in on some profits.

To which I, an unprofessional doomsayer, would like to add only that there are limits to productivity, even if mainstream economists don’t always recognise them.