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Ecological intensification at IBC18

Doyle McKey‘s presentation at IBC18 sounds like a doozy. I was alerted to it by Eve Emshwiller on Twitter, who said, among other things:

McKey: ecological intensification, not just green revolution model “intensification” of ag needed. #ibc18

Music to our ears, of course. Here’s a summary from the (very large) Abstract Book of the congress.

The evolutionary ecology of plant chemical defenses in agroecosystems: past, present and future.

McKey, Gleadow, Cavagnaro

Plant chemical defenses mediate interactions between plants, their herbivores and pathogens, and the naturalenemies of these plant parasites. In domesticated plants, farmers are added to this web of interactions. Plant defenses have been subjected to complex selection pressures under domestication, leading both to decreases and to increases in their concentration, and to shifts in their intra-plant distribution. This complexity is explained partly by variation in the kinds of plants farmers chose to domesticate, and partly by the kinds of environments that nature and farmers combined to create in agroecosystems. Today, the interactions mediated by plant defenses are affected by changing climate, rising temperature and increased atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide. These changes can threaten food security by lowering not only the production of food but also its nutritional quality. The strategies proposed to counter these threats envisage a wide range of ways, not mutually exclusive, to manage biotic interactions in agroecosystems. These include modifying crop plants’ natural constitutive and induced defenses and other sources of resistance; engineering crop plants to express novel defenses; and increasing the effectiveness of ‘integrated pest management’ (through natural enemies, other components of agrobiodiversity and pesticides) by modifying the structure and functioning of agroecosystems. In this presentation, we examine these proposed solutions through the evolutionary ecologist’s lens: What are their respective costs and benefits, and how do these affect the ecological situations in which each could help farmers produce sufficient amounts of high-quality food? How can the coevolutionary dynamics of interactions between crop plants and their biotic environment be managed to avert catastrophic fluctuation of yield?

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Unlocking a presentation on unlocking agriculture’s past

The talk that Jacob is planning to give later today at the National Geographic store in Madrid (and you can follow online) is now available on Slideshare.

Unlocking Agriculture's Past

LATER: I forgot to use a hashtag, but you can see my live-tweeting of Jacob’s talk by searching for his name. Maybe Jacob can tell us if the video will be available in due course. And no, he didn’t answer my online question about the difference between oca and potato. Wimp.

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The pros and cons of genetic pollution

ResearchBlogging.orgIs genetic pollution necessarily a bad thing? Well of course there’s pollution and pollution, and the term is often used to describe what might happen to a crop or its wild relatives when a GM variety of that crop starts to be grown in their proximity. But here I mean the genetic mixing of two previously isolated plant populations. As could happen, for example, when you regenerate two genebank accessions of an outcrossing crop side by side. Or when you cultivate an exotic variety of an agroforestry species near wild stands of the same species. Or when you use seed of a wild species from point A to help restore its numbers at far-away point B. The debate about whether genetic mixing is a good or bad thing for conservation has been going on for a while, of course. It is generally thought to be bad. But by coincidence three papers came across my desk this week which suggest that we should perhaps keep an open mind.

The first paper looks at an annual plant in California, Mimulus laciniatus. 1 The researchers compared the progenies of different kinds of crosses in a common garden experiment to measure their overall fitness. They crossed plants from populations at the centre and at the warm periphery of the distribution of the species in various combinations. The most successful crosses, in terms of lifetime reproductive success, were between plants that came from different edge populations. So in this case, a little bit of pollution is actually a pretty good thing, if it comes from the right place.

The second paper looks at a long-lived woody shrub in Australia, Telopea speciosissima. 2 There’s a lot of different aspects to the study, but let me focus on just one. The species is found along an altitudinal transect. There is considerable genetic structure along this transect, and a close association between altitude, temperature and flowering time. Altitude influences flowering phenology, differences in which throw up a temporal reproductive barrier between coastal and upland populations, leading to genetic differentiation. But not as much as formerly. The current temperature gradient is much flatter than it used to be at glacial maximum, and this has led to phenological overlap and genetic mixing at intermediate altitudes. What’s happening is a natural version of the centre x edge crosses done artificially in the previous paper. The fitness result? The authors are not sure. Could be good, could be bad. They’re going to set up the experiments to find out.

And finally we have a paper on the use of natural hybrids in forest restoration. 3 This really ups the ante. We’re no longer talking about the kinds of intra-specific hybrids found at the admixture front at mid-altitudes in the previous paper, or the progenies of the artificial crosses between populations made in the first. We’re talking about hybrids between related tree species. Genetic pollution squared. The authors point out that “restoration programs rarely use local hybrid individuals if a local species exhibits natural hybridization.” But they think they should.

…our current research based on ecophysiological measures of water-use efficiency under controlled conditions on seedlings from these populations suggest that hybrids deal with drier conditions better than either parental species, a trait that could be important for climate change adaptation.

So, should we be a bit more relaxed about genetic pollution? The debate can only intensify as the need for species and habitat restoration, and perhaps assisted migration, increases with climate change. Perhaps we should start by choosing a less value-laden term for it.