Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
Public funding for extension services and agricultural research that improves productivity and yield had to increase rather than relying upon genetically modified organisms.
From the head of UNDP? What kind of a crazy mixed-up world are we living in?
If you’ve been following (listening to?) our tweets 1 you might have seen this enigmatic little gem:
Population genetic diversity influences colonization success. K. M. CRAWFORD. Molecular Ecology: http://goo.gl/JFHh
And, possibly, ignored it. It must have registered at some level though, because when I saw Inbreeding bad for invasives too at C.J.A. Bradshaw’s blog Conservationbytes.com I thought, “Hmmn, I wonder if that’s the thing we tweeted”. 2 And it was. Bradshaw does a great job of explaining how it is that reduced genetic diversity contributes not only to a population’s risk of extinction, but also to its ability to invade new habitats.
Crawford & Whitney measured greater population-level seedling emergence rates, biomass production, flowering duration and reproduction in high-diversity populations compared to lower-diversity ones. Maintain a high genetic diversity and your invasive species has a much higher potential to colonise a novel environment and spread throughout it.
Of course, this is related to propagule pressure because the more individuals that invade/are introduced the more times, the higher the likelihood that different genomes will be introduced as well.
So far the experimental evidence comes only from Arabidopsis thaliana, the white rat of the plant biologist. But I’d be willing to bet that if you could measure such a thing as invasiveness and persistence for crop varieties, where people, rather than nature, determine how many propagules survive and spread, the ones that are both widespread and long-lasting are also the ones with the most genetic diversity.
The Guardian has a photo essay on how farmers are trying to cope with climate change in Tajikistan. 3
Turaqulov Saidmuzator, a farmer in Temumalik district, is experiencing the effects of climate change. ‘I think the weather has become warmer in the last four or five years and that is affecting our crops,’ he says. ‘The sickness of our crops is increasing but the pesticides are expensive and we are losing almost 30% of our crops to diseases.’
Andre has “great, great trouble with the data” from that vegetables and PVP paper:
For instance, the table says that no turnip has ever been PVP protected; according to the Office’s data base, two have been. The authors highlighted in a previous paper, with a ‘hurrah’, that Fowler and Mooney made a math error in their 1983 “Shattering…”. They also succumb to a simple subtraction at the bottom of the first column.
There’s more. Over to the authors… BTW, our original source was the CAS-IP blog.
“Cherry trees require a minimum of 8,000 hours of low temperatures over the winter to produce the optimum blossoms, but as Japan gets warmer we are falling short of that figure,” said [Dr Abe].
“And that is a problem because we Japanese love cherry blossom season.”
Dr. Abe’s team has responded to this national crisis by creating a cherry tree that blooms in all four seasons, keeping its flowers for longer, producing more blossoms and under a wider range of temperatures than any existing breeds.
How? A combination of radiation and grafting. Which means that one will now be able to wear the Human Polllination Suit all year round.