CABI Blogs: hand picked... and carefully sorted

Indigenous knowledge to enlighten sustainable development

Indigenous peoples are characterised by having their own land to which they are connected at various levels, and protecting this special relationship has attracted a great deal of media attention recently. Demonstrations have resumed demanding a stop to the construction of Keystone XL and Dakota Access pipelines for oil transportation as campaigners and experts say these pipelines would threaten Native American reservations yet create only a few dozen permanent jobs. These conflicts reflect deeper issues than sheer disagreements about economic interests and land ownership – they reveal two fundamentally different approaches to relating with nature. Below, I explain how viewing the planet as a supplier of resources or as a provider of nurturance may even determine our success in living sustainably as a global community.

How soil health is integral to One Health

One of a series of blogs written by CABI editors for One Health (#OneHealth) Day on November 3^rd 2016

 "It is difficult to rate the importance of the different soil functions, since all are vital to our well-being to some extent. However, the function of supporting food and agriculture worldwide is fundamental for the preservation and advancement of human life on this planet." - Food and Agriculture Organization of the United States (FAO).

 

The multiple roles of soil often go unnoticed. During time spent carrying out research for this blog I came across the following quote which I feel really captures the relevance of soil health for the One Health concept:

‘The health of soil, plant, animal and man is one and indivisible’.

This was actually said seven decades ago by Lady Eva Balfour, one of the first women to study agriculture at an English University, who went on to found the Soil Association in 1946. Yet it seems that on many levels we are still to realise the connectedness between health in soils, plants, animals and people.

How crop diversity could help secure our future food supply

Diversity within maize. Image source: Sam Fentress, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1293212

16 October is World Food Day (#WFD2016); this year’s theme is ‘Climate is changing. Food and agriculture must too.’ Jennifer Cunniff, plant scientist in CABI’s editorial team looks at how harnessing crop diversity is vital for us to meet the challenge.

Of the wide variety of edible plant species growing on our planet it’s amazing how few of them we actually include in our diet. Around 30 000 edible plant species are known, yet only 30 of these feed the world, and we are heavily reliant on a handful of cereals - rice, bread wheat, maize, millets and sorghum - provide 60% of the energy intake of the world population (FAO). This narrowing of our food base largely started with the advent of farming – before then, there is plentiful archaeological evidence that shows we were foraging across a much wider breadth of plant species (e.g. Weiss et al. 2004; Fairbairn et al. 2006). Once we formed settled societies we began to focus on crops that offered the best level of return and were best adapted to the cultivated environments we created. Furthermore, even though multiple accessions¹ of our widely grown cereal species exist (naturally and through breeding) only a few dozen are grown on a wide scale. This strategy has consequences – genetic variability for adaptation to future climate change is lost.

¹ A single collected variety or cultivar. It could be a wild variety, a landrace or a bred cultivar.

 

School expedition gathers data on biodiversity in Mexico

 Scuba quadrats. Image credit: David H. Williams, Rye St Antony

Our guest blogger this month is David Williams, who is the Head of Science at Rye St Antony School, Oxford. He recently led a group of schoolgirls on an Operation Wallacea expedition to Mexico, where they took part in a conservation project which involved conducting mammal surveys and assessing the impacts of tourism on turtle populations and coral reefs. David tells his story as a diary looking at events over the two-week expedition.

I was delighted to be asked to blog on this subject. One of my student’s parents works at CABI (Centre for Agriculture and Biosciences International) – an organisation that focuses on the environment and biodiversity. As an editor at this organisation, she saw the opportunity to highlight the work of schools and conservation. I’m keen to promote science both as a career and as an interest for life, and feel that this is best done by encouraging an appreciation of science as a real, relevant and ongoing subject. My story starts here …

A fifth of the world’s plants under threat, as report says 391,000 species now known to science

A ground-breaking report from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, has produced an estimate of the number of plants known to science. By searching through existing databases, the researchers have estimated that there are now 390,900 known plant species, of which around 369,400 are flowering plants. But this figure is only those species currently documented: new species are being discovered all the time, including over 2000 in 2015 alone. But more worryingly, it is suggested that 21% of plant species are under threat, from a range of pressures including climate change, habitat loss and invasive species. The invasive species component of the report, which draws heavily on CABI’s Invasive Species Compendium, says that nearly 5,000 plant species are documented as invasive, from over 13,000 vascular plant species naturalised outside their native range.

Prof Kathy Willis, director of science at RBG Kew, said: "It's really important to know how many plant species there are, where they are and the relationship between the groups, because plants are absolutely fundamental to our well-being”

And on invasive species, the head of conservation science at Kew, Dr Colin Clubbe, said that invasive species are one of the biggest challenges for biodiversity. Quantifying the number of species regarded as invasive is a key step towards addressing the problem. "Now that we've got this list and this number, it's certainly a bit like know your enemy," said Dr Clubbe.

Japanese knotweed, a major invasive

Buzzing activity around pollinator health

Yesterday I cherished the start of spring in England by attending an event devoted to pollinators and pollination at the University of Reading. Most presentations at this meeting organised by the Royal Entomological Society were understandably about bees, but we also heard a few talks highlighting the importance of other pollinator groups.

For about five years now the media has been broadcasting alarming news about declining bee populations especially in Europe and North America. While the amounting evidence points to neonicotinoid insecticides being a major cause for the decline, I learnt yesterday that the situation is actually rather complex, other stressors are also involved, and scientists are still eagerly trying to form a complete understanding of the issue.

Workshop on “Food Security: Infectious Diseases in Farm Animals” brings together animal and veterinary scientists from Egypt and the UK

St. Catherine’s College, Manor Road, Oxford, UK,  4-7^th April 2016 

Attended by M Djuric, CAB International, Wallingford, UK, on 5^th April 2016 (Day 2)

This workshop meeting was jointly organised by the Pirbright Institute, Woking, UK and Cairo University, Egypt and was sponsored by the British Council Research Links Programme.

There were 50-60 delegates in attendance at the meeting, with approximately one-half of delegates coming from various faculties and Research Institutes of Cairo University. The other half of participants came from the UK, including the Pirbright Institute, Woking, Royal Veterinary College (RVC), University of London, Surrey University and Roslin Institute, Edinburgh.

Venue: St. Catherine's College, Manor Road, Oxford

In total, 21 oral presentations, excluding invited speakers, and 17 posters were included in the meeting programme.               

A representative of the British Council, Shaun Holmes, was scheduled to provide information on Newton Fund News and Future Funding Opportunities on day three of the meeting. I attended on behalf of CABI on day two of the event.

Tree–crop interactions: agroforestry in a changing climate

Twenty years after the first edition of the standard book on tree–crop interactions, edited by Peter Huxley and Chin Ong, we now have a second edition. The second edition has explicit attention to climate change, with chapters on microclimate effects and consequences for the various terms of the water balance.

The primary strength of the book remains the focus on a process-level understanding and, as such, on results beyond the location-specific empirical selection of best practices in a given context. The various chapters help in reasoning how changing conditions may have to be accompanied by changing practices, based on what we know of the balance between competition and complementarity. Apart from a chapter on water and two on roots, the focus remains on aboveground interactions; a volume with deeper analysis of belowground interactions had been published ten years ago.

To continue reading Meine van Noordwijk's blog, click here.

Four new bee species described in Australia - many more remain unidentified

By Miroslav Djuric, DVM, CAB International, Wallingford, UK.

Bee specialists from South Australia have described four new native bees. Three of these bee species have been described as  having narrow faces and very long mouths, allowing them to feed on slender flowers found on the emu bush, a hardy native of the Australian desert environment, and to collect the nectar through a narrow constriction at the base of the emu bush flowers. Based on the authors' description, the way these bees have adapted to feed on emu bush flowers is an excellent example of evolution. The fourth species belongs to a different group and has a more commonly observed round-shaped head.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The four new species belong to the genus Euhesma. Their description is based on evaluation of DNA ‘barcoding’ and morphological comparison of the bees with museum specimens.

Five more bird species that can spread Lyme disease identified in USA

By Miroslav Djuric, DVM, CAB International, Wallingford, UK.

Lyme disease or Lyme borreliosis is the most prevalent arthropod-borne disease of animals and humans in the temperate regions of the northern hemisphere¹. Risk of infection in humans is primarily associated with occupation (e.g. forestry work) or outdoor recreational activities.

Recent surveys show that the overall prevalence of Lyme disease may be stabilizing, but its geographical distribution is increasing. There are foci of Lyme borreliosis in forested areas of Asia, north-western, central and eastern Europe, and the USA. According to the CDC, Lyme disease is the most commonly reported vector borne disease in the United States. It is most commonly diagnosed in the northeast and upper Midwest, especially Wisconsin and Minnesota. However, Lyme disease is spreading geographically, especially into Virginia and the southeastern United States. The CDC estimates that about 300,000 Americans are diagnosed with Lyme disease each year, afflicting sufferers with flu-like symptoms. If not treated with antibiotics, the infection can cause inflammation of the joints and it can affect the heart and nervous system.