Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
Dag agrees with Fayaz on the uncritical use of niche modeling:
True! This is an important warning for uncritical use of niche models. The niche model predictions of a species distribution does not intend to imply that the species would necessarily be expected to be found there. The niche model only calculates a signature of the ecological climate for the specific occurrence data used to calibrate and train the model.
There’s a lot more.
The Science Museum in London has launched an interactive map. The data are from the Met Office’s Hadley Centre, as analyzed by the Walker Institute. I like the Hadley Centre’s one-page summary.
We have blogged a few times about niche modeling and how to improve it. Below Mohamed Fawzy Farag Nawar briefly highlights what will become a useful resource in this field, Lifemapper (the data for the modeling comes from GBIF), but points out some limitations.
Lifemapper.org is an initiative to implement online some sort of generic model to predict where a species might exists based on where it was collected, or where it was otherwise documented that it lived. Fine. But here is the results of the model on the species Clivipollia pulcher. This is a marine mollusk that was found along the coasts of eastern Australian, Papua New Guinea and the Philippines. You will see on the map of predicted distribution that the model suggests it might be found in various places inland in central Africa and Latin America. That is what you get when essential prior knowledge is not introduced to the model. Something like telling the developer of the model that marine species should be modeled to a different set of environmental data than Worldclim, which should only be used for terrestrial fauna and flora. Agricultural species are included in Lifemapper, though again the predicted distributions will have to be looked at fairly carefully before use.
The philosophy behind the One Acre Fund is clearly of a piece with that of the Millennium Villages and the Malawi fertilizer subsidy programme: giving farmers seeds, fertilizers, some advice and a market outlet will do wonders for livelihoods. In a way, it’s a no-brainer: of course it will! And it seems churlish and petty and ungenerous to add the canonical “at least for a while” qualifier, and bring up sustainability and resilience and suchlike when lives are at stake, the need urgent, and the amounts of money involved relatively small. So I won’t go down that route. But I will point out, and not for the first time, that if you are going to do something like this, or this, please first have a look at the amount and uniqueness of the agrobiodiversity you may end up displacing. And I’ll also repeat, again not for the first time, that such initiatives are why we need a global early warning system for genetic erosion. It’s easy to start. All we need is a participatory online mapping platform. You can even submit data via SMS these days!
We’ve been a bit forgetful lately, not submitting items to Scientia Pro Publica, one of the most popular science blog carnivals around. But that doesn’t mean we’ve ignored the latest edition, at Genetic Inference. There’s a bunch of stuff there on climate change, and a link to a long post on David Roubik’s 17-year quest to understand the impact of African Killer Bees.
We nibbled Science Daily’s take on the original scientific paper, but on an amazingly busy day. So it is good to see Greg Laden take a somewhat longer view. To the press release, which he thoughtfully copies, Laden adds the observation that “the so called “African Killer Bees” are nothing other than the wild version of the honey bee,” and points out that people have a hard time relating loving, gentle European honey bees to these killers out of Africa’s dark heart. The interbreeding of wild and domesticated honeybees restored some aggression to domestic stocks and in the process of “Africanizing” them also boosted their honey-gathering abilities.
Roubik’s study concluded that although there have been swings in populations of various bee species, pollination has not suffered. Local bees, sometimes outcompeted by Africanized honeybees, are finding other flowers to sustain them. Most of the local plants are still doing fine, and some that are favoured by local bee species have even spread. But Roubik also sounded a cautionary note that hinges on the insurance value of plant biodiversity.
Basically we’re seeing ‘scramble competition’ as bees replace a lost source of pollen with pollen from a related plant species that has a similar flowering peak–in less-biodiverse, unprotected areas, bees would not have the same range of options to turn to.
That’s crucial. Roubik studied bees in “Sian Ka’an Biosphere Reserve — a vast area of mature tropical rainforest in Quintana Roo state on the Mexican Yucatan”. With fewer flower species among which to choose, local bees might not do so well. On the other hand, if the flower species aren’t there, they won’t suffer from the loss of local bees.