It’s conference season in India, I guess. With the XI Conference of the Parties of the CBD off the ground, that makes two major global talk-fests happening in Hyderabad this week. And we’re just sitting here waiting for you to tell us what’s going down.
Legume geneticists get down in Hyderabad
And off we go with the VIth International Conference on Legume Genetics and Genomics! Or rather, off you go, because we’re stuck here. If anything wildly exciting happens, let us know about it.
LATER: I’ve just been called a legume chauvinist pig for plugging the above genomics conference and not the equivalent Rosaceae one. All righty then, here it is.
LATER STILL: Finally, a hashtag!
2nd day of the 6th International Conference on Legume Genetics and Genomics #VI_ICLGGHYD
— ICRISAT (@ICRISAT) October 3, 2012
Featured: Perenniation
Cindy Cox, one of the authors of the article described in a recent IFPRI article, encourages us to look beyond groundnuts, and trees, in thinking about perenniation.
I admit the first thing I saw in the IFPRI article was the picture and caption and I immediately slapped my forehead (groundnuts, perennials? doh!). Also, it is a shame that most readers seem to stop at trees and think this is yet another agroforestry article. There are indeed three perenniation strategies presented in the article, only one of which includes trees. Yes, trees use water but if you look at the picture in the article, the tree roots are busting their way through a hard soil layer to access resources that the maize roots would never have on their own. And there is no denying the significant increase in maize yields presented in this article due to perennials.
Good advice.
Taking Vital Sign’s temperature
It completely escaped our notice that a project called Vital Signs was launched a few months ago in Africa with a $10 million, 3-year grant from the Gates Foundation. The grantees are Conservation International, The Earth Institute and South Africa’s Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, and the idea is as follows:
The Vital Signs Africa monitoring system provides near-real time data and diagnostic tools to inform agricultural development decisions and monitor their outcomes. Vital Signs metrics and indicators will verify that investments to improve food production also support healthy natural systems and robust livelihoods for smallholder farmers.
Very worthy, and right up our alley here at the Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog, which makes it all the more galling that we didn’t pick up on it earlier. Anyway, some preliminary results for one area in Tanzania (the Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor of Tanzania, or SAGCOT) were presented at the recent AGRA Forum in Arusha, which is how we got to hear about it now.
The question, of course, is whether agricultural biodiversity is being monitored, along with such things as population density, household income, value of biodiversity and fuelwood availability, which are among the data categories that were discussed in Arusha. That “value of biodiversity” does sound promising, but then you read only that “through park entry fees, photography permits and other sources of income, this value is estimated to be more than US$ 650 million per year in the SAGCOT.”
The project’s website is not much help, as it has little beyond some admittedly very nice photographs. But I guess it’s early days yet. I have contacted the people concerned and hopefully I’ll be able to report back very soon.
It is interesting that the Gates Foundation is using Vital Signs as an example of its interest in, and commitment to, agroecological approaches to agricultural development, though whether the project qualifies is disputed.
Brainfood: Wild barley drought tolerance, GM cassava retraction, Lupinus ploidy, Diversity levels
- SSR analysis of introgression of drought tolerance from the genome of Hordeum spontaneum into cultivated barley (Hordeum vulgare ssp vulgare). Scary thing is that only two wild accessions are involved.
- Transgenic Biofortification of the Starchy Staple Cassava (Manihot esculenta) Generates a Novel Sink for Protein. Fancy biotech puts more of a substance in cassava that nobody eats cassava for. No, wait.
- Whole genome duplication in a threatened grassland plant and the efficacy of seed transfer zones. Mixing of seed from different populations can be a good idea for conservation of rare plants, but not when they also differ in ploidy.
- Genetic diversity in widespread species is not congruent with species richness in alpine plant communities. Cannot use one as a proxy for the other.