Food for thought : the underutilized potential of tropical tree-sourced foods for 21st century sustainable food systems

1. The global food system is causing large-scale environmental degradation and is a major contributor to climate change. Its low diversity and failure to produce enough fruits and vegetables is contributing to a global health crisis. 2. The extraordinary diversity of tropical tree species is increasingly recognized to be vital to planetary health and especially important for supporting climate change mitigation. However, they are poorly integrated into food systems. Tropical tree diversity offers the potential for sustainable production of many foods, providing livelihood benefits and multiple ecosystem services including improved human nutrition. 3. First, we present an overview of these environmental, nutritional and livelihood benefits and show that tree-sourced foods provide important contributions to critical fruit and micronutrient (vitamin A and C) intake in rural populations based on data from sites in seven countries. 4. Then, we discuss several risks and limitations that must be taken into account when scaling-up tropical tree-based food production, including the importance of production system diversity and risks associated with supply to the global markets. 5. We conclude by discussing several interventions addressing technical, financial, political and consumer behaviour barriers, with potential to increase the consumption and production of tropical tree-sourced foods, to catalyse a transition towards more sustainable global food systems

Automated conservation assessment of the orchid family with deep learning

International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List assessments are essential for prioritizing conservation needs but are resource intensive and therefore available only for a fraction of global species richness. Automated conservation assessments based on digitally available geographic occurrence records can be a rapid alternative, but it is unclear how reliable these assessments are. We conducted automated conservation assessments for 13,910 species (47.3% of the known species in the family) of the diverse and globally distributed orchid family (Orchidaceae), for which most species (13,049) were previously unassessed by IUCN. We used a novel method based on a deep neural network (IUC‐NN). We identified 4,342 orchid species (31.2% of the evaluated species) as possibly threatened with extinction (equivalent to IUCN categories critically endangered [CR], endangered [EN], or vulnerable [VU]) and Madagascar, East Africa, Southeast Asia, and several oceanic islands as priority areas for orchid conservation. Orchidaceae provided a model with which to test the sensitivity of automated assessment methods to problems with data availability, data quality, and geographic sampling bias. The IUC‐ NN identified possibly threatened species with an accuracy of 84.3%, with significantly lower geographic evaluation bias relative to the IUCN Red List and was robust even when data availability was low and there were geographic errors in the input data. Overall, our results demonstrate that automated assessments have an important role to play in identifying species at the greatest risk of extinction

Investigating the vegetation-soil relationships on the copper-cobalt rock outcrops of Katanga (D. R. Congo), an essential step in a biodiversity conservation plan

Plant communities of soils naturally enriched in copper and cobalt in Katanga (D. R. Congo) are critically threatened in the short term due to mining activities. For biodiversity conservation and ecosystem restoration purposes, there is an urgent need to acquire more knowledge on those plant communities including their diversity and their relationships to environmental factors. The classification of 62 vegetation plots located in 6 metal-rich rocky hills in the Tenke Fungurume mining area resulted in 3 well-defined steppic and steppic savanna communities. Canonical analysis showed that the community comprising the largest proportion of strictly endemic metallophytes (i.e. species that only occur on metal-rich soils) developed in the soils with the most elevated concentrations of Cu and Co. However, contrasting species assemblages in the two other plant communities were explained by soil nutrients and percentage rocks in addition to heavy metal concentrations. The results of this study will assist with restoration efforts because they (1) provide a rigorous assessment of communities before a disturbance and (2) define essential edaphic conditions needed for the reestablishment of critical communities.FLWINinfo:eu-repo/semantics/publishe

Supplementary material 4 from: de Jong Y, Kouwenberg J, Boumans L, Hussey C, Hyam R, Nicolson N, Kirk P, Paton A, Michel E, Guiry M, Boegh P, Pedersen H, Enghoff H, von Raab-Straube E, Güntsch A, Geoffroy M, Müller A, Kohlbecker A, Berendsohn W, Appeltans W, Arvanitidis C, Vanhoorne B, Declerck J, Vandepitte L, Hernandez F, Nash R, Costello M, Ouvrard D, Bezard-Falgas P, Bourgoin T, Wetzel F, Glöckler F, Korb G, Ring C, Hagedorn G, Häuser C, Aktaç N, Asan A, Ardelean A, Borges P, Dhora D, Khachatryan H, Malicky M, Ibrahimov S, Tuzikov A, De Wever A, Moncheva S, Spassov N, Chobot K, Popov A, Boršić I, Sfenthourakis S, Kõljalg U, Uotila P, Olivier G, Dauvin J, Tarkhnishvili D, Chaladze G, Tuerkay M, Legakis A, Peregovits L, Gudmundsson G, Ólafsson E, Lysaght L, Galil B, Raimondo F, Domina G, Stoch F, Minelli A, Spungis V, Budrys E, Olenin S, Turpel A, Walisch T, Krpach V, Gambin M, Ungureanu L, Karaman G, Kleukers R, Stur E, Aagaard K, Valland N, Moen T, Bogdanowicz W, Tykarski P, Węsławski J, Kędra M, M. de Frias Martins A, Abreu A, Silva R, Medvedev S, Ryss A, Šimić S, Marhold K, Stloukal E, Tome D, Ramos M, Valdés B, Pina F, Kullander S, Telenius A, Gonseth Y, Tschudin P, Sergeyeva O, Vladymyrov V, Rizun V, Raper C, Lear D, Stoev P, Penev L, Rubio A, Backeljau T, Saarenmaa H, Ulenberg S (2015) PESI - a taxonomic backbone for Europe. Biodiversity Data Journal 3: e5848. https://doi.org/10.3897/BDJ.3.e5848

How to complete taxonomic gaps in the pan-­European species registers, including experts and informatics resource