A new funding scheme aims to revive research in systematics and taxonomy, a crucial field which has struggled somewhat in recent years. The scheme, announced by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC) and Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), will provide £750,000 over three years to fund research. The aim is to enable systematics biologists and taxonomists to develop proposals to compete for the councils’ larger pots of blue-skies funding.

The House of Lords Science and Technology Committee has conducted three inquiries into the area in the past 15 years, highlighting a critical decline owing to a lack of funding and a low number of researchers. Its last report, published in August 2008, concludes that a lack of professional taxonomic expertise is threatening Britain’s ability to conserve its biodiversity, protect endangered species and measure the effects of climate change. Last month, the BBSRC’s Independent Bioscience Skills and Careers Strategy Panel described systematics and taxonomy as a “strategically important and vulnerable” niche. It said the council had spent only £15.3 million of its roughly £400 million budget in the area in 2007-08, and that less than 1 per cent of this went on taxonomy research, with the rest going to systematics.

The new scheme, called SynTax, will see £250,000 made available every year for three years to fund small, short-term grants. The size of the grants, which must have a “substantial” systematic or taxonomic component, will range from £5,000 to £30,000 and run for up to two years. They will enable preliminary research and early proof-of-principle experiments that will later form the basis of responsive-mode (blue-skies) applications to the BBSRC or NERC.

SynTax supersedes the Collaborative Systematics (CoSyst) scheme. However, its annual funding level is more than triple its predecessor’s £75,000 a year. The scheme will be administered by the Linnean Society and the Systematics Association. SynTax calls are annual, with the first open until the end of January.

The SynTax website can be found here.

Milder UK winters are resulting in increased crop damage from aphids, research from the Rothamsted Institute has found.

Aphids are now appearing up to four weeks earlier than the long-term average; the findings indicate that for every 1 degree centigrade rise in January or February the aphids are emerging 8 days earlier than on average in the 42 years the research has been going on at Rothamsted. Of particular concern is the peach-potato aphid (Myzus persicae), which feeds on a variety of plants including fruits and vegetables, having been recorded as emerging two weeks earlier than the long-term average.

Dr Richard Harrington of the Rothamsted Insect Survey described how warmer winters lead to earlier emergence or advanced phenology:

“One of the most noticeable consequences of climate change in the UK is the frequency of mild winters. As a direct result of this, aphids… are appearing significantly earlier in the year and in significantly higher numbers… …after a warm winter, there are much larger numbers flying and they are hence detected much earlier. This means that there are more aphids flying in spring and early summer, when crops are particularly vulnerable to damage.”

Aphids are important vectors of a variety of diseases that affect fruit and vegetables including strawberries and tomatoes. They also inflict damage on crop plants directly by predation. Crops such as potatoes are particularly vulnerable to aphids whilst they are young – exactly the time when aphids are increasingly beginning to emerge in their greatest numbers.

Dr. Harrington envisages that if current trends continue, aphid numbers could increase 10-fold over the next fifty years.

Now that the BBSRC funded research has identified this problem, mitigation options can be considered for the future to prevent serious crop loss.

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