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posted by Fnord666 on Sunday March 11 2018, @06:12PM   Printer-friendly
from the planning-for-the-future dept.

Smart land-use planning could ease the conflict between agricultural production and nature conservation. A team of researchers from the University of Göttingen, the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv), the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) and the University of Münster integrated global datasets on the geographical distributions and ecological requirements of thousands of animal species with detailed information on the production of the world’s major agricultural crops. The results were published in Global Change Biology.

Increasing agricultural production usually leads to various negative side effects in agricultural landscapes, such as local decline in wildlife and loss of ecosystem functions. But what would happen if agricultural growth would be focused on areas of the world where only a few animal species would be affected?

The researchers evaluated how far global biodiversity loss could be minimized by such planning. They found that 88 percent of the biodiversity that is expected to be lost under future agricultural intensification could be avoided if global land use was spatially optimized.

“However, global optimization implies that species-rich countries, mainly in the tropics, would be more responsible for safeguarding the world’s natural resources – at the expense of their own production opportunities and economic development,” says lead author Lukas Egli of Göttingen University and UFZ.

This applies mainly to countries that are highly dependent on agriculture. “Unless such conflicting national interests can be somehow accommodated in international sustainability policies, global cooperation seems unlikely and might generate new socioeconomic dependencies.”

Lukas Egli et al. Winners and losers of national and global efforts to reconcile agricultural intensification and biodiversity conservation. Global Change Biology 2018. Doi: 10.1111/gcb.14076.


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Sunday March 11 2018, @08:20PM (3 children)

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Sunday March 11 2018, @08:20PM (#651044) Journal

    Well, WRT acorns I know of answers.
    1) Natural acorns are poisonous.
    2) Even after processing, acorns are bitter, and few people find their taste acceptable unless they are VERY hungry.

    As for hazelnuts, remember that they are also called filberts. The nuts aren't cheap, or they would be more widely used. Even so various commercial breads, at least, contain hazelnuts. Personally, I prefer them as fresh nuts, as they don't have a strong flavor, and it's easily overridden by any other strong flavor.

    Oats have a lot to recommend over wheat, but they don't lend themselves as well to volume harvesting. Also, the breads made with them tend to be heavier. There are many other grains, but they each have a reason why wheat is preferred by most commercial entities.

    I agree entirely with your major points, but the present circumstances didn't happen by accident, there were reasons for each choice. I often think it would be wise to revisit many of the choices and see if we couldn't find alternatives, but in each case it would cost money, and have no certainty of success. How would you like to invest in developing a variety of oats that would yield a good harvest and be easily made into a light bread? I wouldn't. What might be more reasonable is to invest in, say, developing a peanut that was mold resistant (aflatoxin resistant) and higher in protein. Or perhaps adapting the kudzu genome to convert it into something easily processed into a food. (You want to require the processing step so that it doesn't immediately host huge quantities of insects, rodents, etc. But something simple like processing with aqueous ammonia followed by vinegar.)

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  • (Score: 2) by frojack on Monday March 12 2018, @12:20AM (2 children)

    by frojack (1554) on Monday March 12 2018, @12:20AM (#651127) Journal

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acorn#Uses [wikipedia.org]

    Somehow several thousand generations of humans failed to notice they were poison.
    Or maybe they just roasted them just like the roasted poisonous cashews.

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    • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday March 12 2018, @02:31AM (1 child)

      by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Monday March 12 2018, @02:31AM (#651173) Journal

      Did you notice that they ground the acorns up into flour and then boiled the flour?
      In that way it's rather like how they make tapioca, but tapioca is bland, where acorns are reputed to be quite bitter even after processing.

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      • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Monday March 12 2018, @02:43AM

        by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Monday March 12 2018, @02:43AM (#651176) Journal

        Yeah, I did notice that your link didn't say anything about how the acorns were processed before they were eaten. But since you ignored that I said that "Even after processing, acorns are ..." I figured it was only fair to ignore the information on your link. Now if you'd linked to a better source I wouldn't feel that way, but really, that was a link wasn't even appropriate for 4th graders researching their geography essay.

        Yes, it's true that AFTER PROCESSING American Indians used to eat acorns during the hungry season. But they didn't do it without first processing them to remove the poisons (I think mainly tannic acid, but I'm not sure), and even then they quickly adopted alternatives, because even after they got used to the taste they didn't really like it.

        P.S.: Here's a much better link: https://honest-food.net/how-to-eat-acorns/ [honest-food.net] but, perhaps it's the variety of oak in this area, that's a lot more favorable than the reports I've heard from local people. And this area has a lot of "natural food" faddists.

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