Crop Ferality and Volunteerism

by Jonathan Gressel (Editor)

Overview

At a time when much of humanity is already but one failed harvest removed from starvation, we cannot afford to ignore any potential danger to food security, especially when that danger poses a threat to rice, the staff of life for so much of the world. Crop Ferality and Volunteerism brings together research pioneers from various disciplines

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781040201961
Publisher:	CRC Press
Publication date:	04/12/2005
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	448
File size:	10 MB

Table of Contents

Evolution of Ferality. Volunteerism and Ferality in Not-fully-domesticated Crops. Volunteerism and Ferality in Domesticated Crops. Rice, the Worse Case Scenario Come True.

Editorial Reviews

"The publication of this book is, therefore, timely as it attempts to address the knowledge gap surrounding the impacts and consequences of ferality. …provides a wealth of valuable information on crop and weed science, plant molecular biology and genetics that relates to volunteer and feral plants. The articles are extensively referenced and are illustrated by black and white diagrams, graphs, and photographs. The book is very informative and deserves our attention. …will be a useful primer for undergraduates, post-graduates, researchers, and regulators who wish to study the interactions between crops, ferals, and wild relatives. It will also assist their understanding of the processes that underpin crop domestication and de-domestication. … will also stimulate researchers to investigate the contribution of gene flow to the dynamics of feral populations in a wide range of crop plants."

- Jonathan Davey, Annals of Botany, 99:205-207, 2007

"…an intriguing and important publication on an increasingly critical aspect of contemporary crop production. …this 445-page work provides information that is otherwise unavailable in a concentrated form to the scientific community, and serves as a step toward learning whether transgenic crops pose ferality issues differing from non-transgenic cultivars."

-IPM net News, #142, Oct/Nov. 2005

"…serves to further our understanding of the intricate interactions within the wild-weed-crop complex on a crop-by-crop basis for a large number of crops cultivated worldwide. …The book is quite comprehensive and concentrates primarily on field crops via 24 chapters having formats ranging from research articles to reviews with black and white illustrations and photos. …The book draws attention not only to the idiosyncratic nature of each crop system and the effects of potential novel traits but also to the dramatic lack of scientific information in this field. …This book is an excellent resource for researchers as well as graduate and undergraduate students interested in the ontogeny, impact, and interaction of weeds. It would also be a useful reference to anyone wanting to learn more about the processes of domestication and dedomestication within agriculture, and how they may relate to the increased cultivation of transgenic plants."

-Laurian S. Robert, Eastern Cereal and Oilseed Research Centre, Ottawa, Canada, Crop Science, April, 2006

"The chapters take a unique form of containing pre-workshop, peer-reviewed information together with transcribed or integrated information from workshop discussions. This format lends itself to a balanced discussion that addresses concerns of optimists and cynics of transgenic technology and the agricultural, economic, and ecological impacts of ferality. …Due emphasis is given to the recognition that the problem of crop ferality and volunteerism is not unique to transgenic crops. …The authors largely support invocation of the 'precautionary principle.' This applies to gene flow from transgenic crops into nature and crop ferality in general. …this compilation addresses crop ferality in a broad-ranging, yet thorough manner. It is a useful general resource for an area of research that has been scantily documented for crop plants."

-Beronda L. Montgomery, Michigan State University, Economic Botany, Vol. 60

"This is an interesting and timely book about the ways that crop plants go wild. It is an excellent compendium of information on the origins of crop plants and on their genetics in the wild under domestication. The range of crops discussed in detail is impressive rape, beet, millet, sorghum, maize, soybean, wheat, rye, radish, sunflower, and six whole chapters on rice."

-M.J. Crawley, Imperial College, Silwood park, Crop Protection, Vol. 25, 2006

"… a magnificent original contribution concerning one of the significant new botanical challenges of our age. …Contributors with exceptional credentials were brought together to inform one another about the world's major crops and their wild and weedy relatives. The result is both scholarly and inspirational. The usual drawback of multi-authored volumes is absent here, thanks to skillful editing and extraordinary groundwork. This book will appeal to a wide variety of readers. Those interested in theoretical aspects of plant domestication as well as persons with applied interests e.g. assessing the environmental risks of transgenic volunteer weeds, the potential economic damage by feral crops, will profit from this book. …extremely thought provoking…The book is carefully edited, and each chapter is comprehensive and well referenced."

-Dorothea Bedigian, Missouri Botanical Gardens, St. Louis, Plant Science Bulletin, 2006

From the Publisher