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How to breed for the future

There’s an interesting discussion going on over at PBForum, an e-mail based forum for plant breeding and related fields managed by GIPB. It started out with a question from a Philippines breeder about how to get climate-ready rice varieties. I was particularly struck by the latest contribution, which basically said that, rather, we should be trying to…

…create climate-change-ready breeding programmes. That is, build in the flexibility to shift relatively quickly to a new climate related breeding objective, once it becomes established in what direction the climate will change and how it will affect crop yield.

What I would add is that such “climate-change-ready breeding programmes” would necessarily include ready access to as wide a range of raw materials as possible, including, crucially, properly evaluated collections of landraces and crop wild relatives conserved in, and readily accessible from, genebanks.

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Featured: Models

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.

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Niche modeling and common sense

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.

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In which our blogger decides not to quibble about the One Acre Fund

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!