Biodiversity: habitat and agriculture

Today two stories I'm sharing were found at the Agrobiodiversity Grapevine. I could simply link the stories but I recognise people are unlikely to go off this site to read them... and both offer important information illuminating the spheres of wild habitat and agriculture.
When I commenced the Homage to the Seed project in 2010 I was on residency at the Botanic Garden in the city where I live... in Brisbane, Australia. The focus there was on indigenous plants from Qld in the Seed Lab set up in in partnership with KEW MSB (Millennium Seedbank).
I was very drawn to learn about indigenous plant species and painted Qld rainforest fruits species concentrating on seed capsules and the motifs that were drawn form the cross-sections of these seed capsules.

This was the visual focus for my art but given 2010 was the UN International Year of Biodiversity I keenly pursued the stories coming out on agrobiodiversity as well, feeling that 'homage to the seed' needed to consider all aspects of the realm of seeds.

SO here are stories that cover both aspects of the seed realm...

First, a story from London's

Ive shared below as it gives a good picture of the importance of plant hunting and naming species in order to see whats occurring around the planet.

Also these links:

Related information

• Latest news
• What is taxonomy?
• What threatens our biodiversity?
• Extinction threat to 1 in 5 of world's plants news, Sept 2010
• Botany department
• Dr Mark Carine
• Mr Steve Cafferty
• Naming new plant species moves online, Jan 2012

External links

• Plants at risk page on Kew Royal Botanic Gardens
• Big hitting plant collectors paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society B
• University of Oxford

The scientists who identify, name and classify new species are called taxonomists and their work 
is an essential foundation to understanding global biodiversity.

A few great plant hunters find most species

03 February 2012

A scientist collecting plants in the field. There are still many plant species to discover and new research suggests focusing on a few great plant hunters may speed up the discovery process.

Just 2% of plant collectors find the majority of new species, and these great plant hunters could be key to finding the rest of the world's undiscovered plants, according to a report this week in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

Plant collector John Wood in Bolivia - one of the great plant hunters identified in new research who could be crucial to efforts to find the world's remaining unidentified plant species. © Darwin Initiative

Scientists led by Oxford University and including those at the Natural History Museum, studied over 100,000 type specimens - the important specimens that scientists use when naming a new species. They found that over 50% of the type specimens were discovered by 2% of the collectors.

These great plant hunters should be a focus of strategies to help find the estimated 15-20% of the world’s flowering plants yet to be discovered, the team says. They find a disproportionate number of new species, and at a time of rapid global biodiversity loss, could be an important way to find plants more quickly before they are lost forever.

Museum plant expert Mark Carine explains, ‘It’s clear from our study that a relatively small number of collectors have made a massive contribution to the discovery of plant species and that those ‘'big hitters'’ become more effective with experience – they tend to collect more species that are new to science towards the end of their careers.

‘Identifying, training, and supporting modern-day plant hunters, and targeting their efforts in the right areas of the world, is likely to be an effective element in completing the inventory of flowering plants.’

There are an estimated 380,000 known plants species. One in 5 plants are threatened with extinction and most threatened plant species are found in the tropics, the area of greatest plant diversity. 

Combining large sets of data

Australian plant specimen collected by Robert Brown more than 200 years ago and looked after in the Museum collections. Brown is one of the great plant hunters from the 18th and 19th centuries.

For the study, 4 of the world's major specimen databases were combined to give a total of102,955 type specimens. The data was from the Natural History Museum, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, Missouri Botanical Garden, and Royal Botanic Garden Melbourne.

The team were able to analyse such large amounts of data because the records had been digitised. Carine explains ‘With support from the Andrew W Mellon Foundation, the Museum has been databasing and imaging the type specimens and putting the data on the web to make them easily accessible.’

Leading the way digitally

This research method is leading the way in how scientific information is shared says Museum plant expert Steve Cafferty, who was also part of the research team. ‘This kind of collections-based research based on large multi-institutional datasets is in the vanguard of major new informatics initiatives, and has only recently become possible through the coordinated efforts to amalgamate such large datasets.’

Specimens at the Museum

More than 50,000 type specimens from the collections at the Museum were used in the study. Carine adds, ‘64 collectors (1.87%) constitute our big hitters as they were responsible for discovering half of the 50,398 type specimens we sampled from our herbarium.’ For example Robert Brown collected nearly 1700 type specimens during his collecting career from 1794-1827, and Arthur FG Kerr found 865 during 1908-1936.

Living great plant hunters

The era of the great plant hunters is often thought of as the 1700s and 1800s, with collectors such as Sir Joseph Banks. However, this pattern persists today says the team. 

The scientists who identify, name and classify new species are called taxonomists and their work is an essential foundation to understanding global biodiversity.

For example during 38 years from 1938, Peter Davis from Edinburgh collected 348 type specimens mostly from Turkey. And John Wood, currently at Oxford University’s Department of Plant Sciences, has collected 30,000 specimens from South America and Asia, many of which are new species.

Challenges

The numbers of living, and potential future, great plant hunters is relatively small. Carine explains, ‘The reality is, there probably aren’t many because it is not a career path that is easy to follow not least because of funding’.

Currently, funding is usually aimed at shorter-term projects and so is unlikely to help build up the expertise that takes a longer time to develop, the team says. And funding is often aimed at newer collectors who, while they tend to collect more specimens in terms of numbers, they are less selective and find fewer new species.

So, although it is a small number of great plant hunters that have the biggest impact in discovering new plant species, this will only continue if the right support and strategies are put in place. 

A new blog I found today, 

Landscapes blog for People, Food and Nature

which offers timely reading:

The Landscapes for People, Food and Nature is not only striving to develop a knowledge base through the Global Review process outlined on Monday, but it also aims to turn that knowledge into action and scale-up activities and policies already in place. One strategy for accomplishing this objective is to target pertinent meetings and events. There are very many such meetings on the horizons, and we have sought to identify those that will provide a forum for scaling up integrated landscapes for people, food and nature, with stakeholder groups relevant to advancing integrated agricultural landscape approaches. Here are some major ones to keep on the radar:

Continue reading →

This is the story I wanted to share.

Time for a new paradigm

Posted on February 2, 2012

By Dr. Emile Frison, Director General
Bioversity International, Rome, Italy

In recent years, evidence has been accumulating about the need for change in agriculture. The International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development report, the 2010 report to the UN by the Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, and FAO’s Save and Grow report, among others, have all highlighted that different approaches are required to achieve food security in a sustainable manner.

The G20, a group comprised of the 20 biggest economies in the world, has joined the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, and others, in making urgent calls for more investment in agriculture, including agricultural research. But the type of agriculture in which we invest is a critical decision. Agriculture gives us more than food and products; it also provides other benefits such as ecosystem services. Simply investing more in ‘business as usual’ will not be sufficient.  Addressing the needs of the billion chronically hungry in a sustainable way will require a rethink of the agricultural model.

What is needed in this redesign? There needs to be a shift in objectives, from maximizing the productivity of a few major staple crops to simultaneously addressing how to improve livelihoods and nutrition of rural communities, and increase the resilience, stability and sustainability of the production system. It will also require taking into account the full range of ecosystem services provided by agricultural landscapes and making better use of a broader range of agricultural biodiversity. Such an approach will also help reconcile the objectives of agricultural production and nature conservation in more diverse agricultural landscapes instead of opposing and segregating these goals in intensive agriculture areas on the one hand and protected areas on the other hand.

The Landscapes for People, Food and Nature Initiative seeks to address these issues and develop ways to realize this shift to a new agricultural paradigm. As one of the co-organizing agencies, Bioversity International has already started a review of its evidence base in preparation for the Initiative’s Global Review. We know from working for many years and in many parts of the world, that successful innovative approaches by smallholder farmers, policymakers, food companies, and conservation and grassroots organizations are already happening in the field.

Participants in this effort will be from government planning agencies, leading research centers and think tanks, donors, the private sector, farmer and community-based organizations from around the world.  Through this international collaborative effort we can share knowledge as the first step to affect real change in agricultural approaches.