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Following threats to animals along supply chains

As Rio +20 looms ever nearer, everyone is scrambling to put stuff out pushing their particular agenda, taking care to note that they’re not suggesting that their agenda is any less vital than anyone else’s agenda, of course, and that in any case There Are No Silver Bullets. One of the more interesting products released to coincide with next week’s Brazilian festivities is an interactive map which uses “a new global trade database to follow the products implicated in species threats right through to the final consumers.”

The paper describing the methodology is in Nature.

We linked 25,000 Animalia species threat records from the IUCN Red List of endangered species to over 15,000 commodities produced in 187 countries. We then used the trade database to evaluate over 5 billion supply chains in terms of their biodiversity impacts.

It’s a massive undertaking, and it may be churlish to wonders why it’s not easier to export the maps it enables one to produce. So I won’t, and merely confine myself to hoping that a plant version will be available soon. Oh, and maybe also one in which agriculture is not seen only as the bad guy. In fact, would it not be nice to have the other side of the coin? That is, a map showing where supply chains may actually be contributing to conservation. Come on, there must be a few examples of that! Bird-friendly coffee, anyone?

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Would you pay €50 per accession?

Bert Visser, director of the Centre for Genetic Resources, the Netherlands (CGN) has just sent the message below to colleagues in the European crop genebank network, and suggested that readers of this blog might also have an opinion. If you have, do leave it here as a comment.

Like so many genebanks, since a number of years CGN has been confronted with increasing costs and diminishing budgets for its core genebank tasks (collecting, regeneration, storage, evaluation, documentation, distribution). Moreover, CGN has observed a considerable increase in the number of distributed samples resulting in increased handling costs and accelerated exhaustion of our stocks with consequently higher yearly regeneration costs.

In order to manage a widening financial gap, in consultation with the Ministry of Economic Affairs, Agriculture and Innovation, CGN is considering a number of measures including a revision of seed viability testing protocols (based on recent findings regarding the storability of seeds under genebank conditions) and a much tighter planning of regeneration and acquisition activities. Furthermore, the private sector will be approached to discuss options for the sector’s continued involvement in regeneration of CGN germplasm.

In addition, we are considering a measure for which we seek your comments and advice. This measure regards the introduction of a handling fee for the distribution of CGN germplasm. The Treaty, in its Article 12, allows for a handling fee, whereas the distribution conditions under AEGIS do not exclude the possibility of such a fee. Globally, only few genebanks have introduced handling fees, notably NIAS (Japan) and AVRDC (global; vegetables). CGN handling fees would not apply to partners that carry out regeneration tasks for CGN, neither to NGOs.

CGN is considering handling fees that could amount up to € 50 per accession. Whereas we consider this a modest amount per accession, the request for large numbers of samples may be strongly discouraged. Therefore, discount fees for larger numbers of requested samples, or for pre-packed sets (core or elite collections) will be considered. In any case, a handling fee might encourage potential users to consider in more detail which accessions are really needed in planned research or breeding programmes, and may prevent poorly motivated requests or intended duplications of CGN germplasm in other collections.

We realise that any unilateral action of CGN may have an impact on you: users may shift from CGN to you assuming your distribution is still free, and you might be asked by your own government to introduce fees as well. There may be other consequences that we have not taken into account yet.

In any case, we do not wish to introduce a unilateral handling fee overnight and have not yet taken any definite decision, and this is why we are consulting you as our European colleagues to have your opinions and feed-back. In particular, we would be interested to hear of any other discussions on the introduction of a handling fee.

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Wheat has become less nutritious since the mid-1960s

ResearchBlogging.org Following up on our recent post drawing attention to the overall decline in micronutrients in fruit and veg, here’s a 2008 paper dealing specifically with wheat. Ming-Sheng Fang and colleagues looked at levels of minerals in grain harvested from one of the longest-running agricultural experiments in the world, the Broadbalk Wheat Experiment. Not just grain, but soil too. And not just historical records — since 1843! — but a direct experiment growing an old variety alongside a modern one.

The paper 1 is honestly a model of clarity; anyone can read and understand it. And the conclusion is pretty straightforward too.

The concentrations of zinc, iron, copper and magnesium remained stable between 1845 and the mid 1960s, but since then have decreased significantly, which coincided with the introduction of semi-dwarf, high-yielding cultivars. In comparison, the concentrations in soil have either increased or remained stable. Similarly decreasing trends were observed in different treatments receiving no fertilizers, inorganic fertilizers or organic manure. Multiple regression analysis showed that both increasing yield and harvest index 2 were highly significant factors that explained the downward trend in grain mineral concentration.

Here’s a picture.

Click to embiggen

And here’s a final, circumspect, conclusion.

Results from the present study suggest that the Green Revolution has unintentionally contributed to decreased mineral density in wheat grain, at least in the Broadbalk Experiment. The study of Garvin et al. [9] suggests that this may also be the case for US wheat.

There are a few other papers showing very similar effects, not all of them straightforward. The general conclusion — that environmental and genetic dilution effects have reduced the concentration of many micronutrients in modern varieties — surely stands.

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Brainfood: Barcoding, DArT for beans, SNOPs for Cacao, Aquaculture impacts, Cassava GS, Cereals in genebanks, Symbiosis

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The final word on why biodiversity loss is bad

There’s a pile of papers on my desk. In a corner of my desk, actually, where I don’t have to look at them too often. Here are their titles:

I just added one yesterday: “Meta-analysis at the intersection of evolutionary ecology and conservation.” You’ve spotted the trend, right? I was planning to write about the whole bunch of them together, a mega-post on the latest thinking on the relationship between biodiversity on the one hand and ecosystem health on the other. They’ve been there for months. I just haven’t been able to get round to them, what with one thing and another. Like work, mainly. And maybe a bit of laziness.

But there’s an upside to prevarication. You wait long enough to do something, if the thing is really important, you’ll find someone does it for you. And so it has proved on this occasion, because “Biodiversity loss and its impact on humanity” has just come out in Nature, and it provides a comprehensive review of the sort of papers that have been sitting in that corner of my desk, lots of them, going back years.

Which means all I need to do here is further summarize the already admirably succinct synthesis that the authors provide. 3 And that I think I can do in a few bullet-points:

  • Loss of biodiversity (really loss of diversity in functional traits) decreases the efficiency and stability of ecosystems.
  • The impacts of biodiversity loss on ecosystem functioning are big, accelerating and predictable.
  • Biodiversity is predictably positively correlated with the provisioning of some ecosystem services, but the data in the case of other services is either mixed, insufficient or runs counter to expectation.

And yes, the dataset included crops, and here’s the snippet of the summary table that deals with agrobiodiversity and ecosystem services: 4

No doubt about the importance of genetic diversity to yield, though surprisingly mixed results for species diversity. But look at the numbers of data points involved (N): 575 data syntheses (DS) for genetic diversity and 100 for species diversity. Makes that pile of papers I’ve been avoiding look rather puny. And me not just a bit lazy.