- Archive and refugia of soil organisms: applying a pedodiversity framework for the conservation of biological and non-biological heritages. They want to set up a network of soil reserves. To conserve the likes of dung beetles, among other things (see last week’s Brainfood). Someone will no doubt mash this up with nature reserves and other protected areas in due course.
- Climate warming over the past three decades has shortened rice growth duration in China and cultivar shifts have further accelerated the process for late rice. One degree increase in temperature translates to about a 4 day shortening of growth period. But the problem would not be so bad if short-duration cultivars were not being increasingly used. No, I don’t fully get it either, but it seems interesting.
- Multiple origins of the determinate growth habit in domesticated common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris). The gene in question, part of the domestication syndrome, has been messed about in a variety of distinct and independent ways.
- The Cassava Mealybug (Phenacoccus manihoti) in Asia: First Records, Potential Distribution, and an Identification Key. Bad news for “the southern end of Karnataka in India, the eastern end of the Ninh Thuan province in Vietnam, and in most of West Timor in Indonesia.” No resistance. Yet.
- Genetic relationship between Chinese wild Vitis species and American and European Cultivars based on ISSR markers. It is limited. That goes for the wilds too.
- Synergies and trade-offs between ecosystem service supply, biodiversity, and habitat conservation status in Europe. What’s good for the environment is good for the environment. Or if you prefer the non-smartass version, get it from the horse’s mouth…
- Development of best practices for ex situ conservation of radish germplasm in the context of the crop genebank knowledge base. See the results for yourself.
- How does climate change cause extinction? Not so much because of intolerance to high temperatures as due to disruption of relationships with other species, as it turns out. But it’s a small sample.
- Testing the “Local Provenance” Paradigm: A Common Garden Experiment in Cumberland Plain Woodland, Sydney, Australia. No difference between locally sourced and more “exotic” provenances. Bang goes that paradigm.
- Mapping the genomic architecture of ecological speciation in the wild: does linkage disequilibrium hold the key? Clever shortcut allows identification of key genes separating phenotypically distinct but admixing species. I think. It’s complicated.
- Breeding Strategies for Adaptation of Pearl Millet and Sorghum to Climate Variability and Change in West Africa. Anything that keeps diversity in the system, basically.
- Estimation of phenotypic divergence in a collection of Cucumis melo, including shelf-life of fruit. Old-fashioned morphological characterization of small Indian collection confirms distinction between botanical varieties. Not many people hurt.
- Pollen diversity matters: revealing the neglected effect of pollen diversity on fitness in fragmented landscapes. Fragmentation means lower pollen diversity in Eucalyptus sp., means lower progeny fitness, and not just because of inbreeding.
- Increasing Cropping System Diversity Balances Productivity, Profitability and Environmental Health. So let me get this straight. You mean to tell me that a little bit of industrial agriculture (synthetic inputs) can combine with a little bit of ecoagriculture (cropping diversity) to give you something that’s kinda better than both?
Unconventional wisdom on biodiversity conventions
As the Convention on Biological Diversity catches its breath after the recent Conference of the Parties in Hyderabad, and the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture lumbers towards the First Meeting of the Ad Hoc Technical Advisory Committee on Sustainable Use of Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture in a couple of weeks time, an onlooker could find himself suffering extreme policy fatigue.
The proper restorative is to take a look at Jim Chen’s forthcoming paper on Bioprospect Theory. This from the abstract:
Indeed, legal approaches to biodiversity and to biotechnology are so twisted that they represent an extreme application of prospect theory. Losing supposedly hurts worse than winning feels good. The law of biodiversity and biotechnology appears to reverse this presumption. Biodiversity loss is staggering and undeniable. Humans are responsible for the sixth great extinction spasm of the Phanerozoic Eon. By contrast, gains from bioprospecting are highly speculative. Even if they are ever realized, they will be extremely concentrated. There is no defensible basis for treating ethnobiological knowledge as the foundation of a coherent approach to global economic development.
In spite of these realities, the global community continues to spend its extremely small and fragile storehouse of political capital on this contentious corner of international environmental law. Global economic diplomacy should be made of saner stuff. The fact that it is not invites us to treat the entire charade as a distinct branch of behavioral law and economics: bioprospect theory.
I’m not alone in thinking that the pharmaceutical industry has a lot to answer for in the madness that is global policy on genetic resources, especially those for food and agriculture. But I also suspect there’s no other game in town.
New use of IT in agriculture, or vice versa
The world’s largest QR code has been carved into a maize (corn) field in Lacombe, Alberta. “At well over 300,000 square feet the QR Code is more than 14 times larger than the previous world record set in Toronto in June.” 1
It works too, if you happen to be flying over with a smartphone. Don’t say we don’t cater to a diversity of interests here.
Give your botany blogposts legs
Time to submit botany blogposts — your own or someone else’s — to Berry Go Round, the internet’s best (and perhaps only) botanical carnival. You have until Friday October 26th to get your plant-loving posts submitted. And if you would like to host this marvelous opportunity to share the botanical love, there’s a link for that too.
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.