Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

September 9, 2026September 9, 2026

Missing use, or missing middle?

Genebank data seems to be in the air. Just in the past few days, I pontificated about descriptors, Mike Jackson has reminisced about the early days of rice molecular markers and CGIAR announced a big new initiative.

More data is always good to have, I’m sure. But, but, but… Genebanks are underused and more data will solve the problem? We’ve been saying something much like this for a long time now. Leave aside for the moment the question of whether CGIAR genebanks really are “underused.” Underused by whom, according to what metric, compared to what? But let’s just assume for the sake of argument that they are, indeed, underused. What if… Hear me out: what if that problem cannot be solved just by making genebank databases bigger, deeper and easier to search?

Ok, that will need some unpacking. But remember as you read this that I’m not saying that genebanks working with others to generate and share more data on nutritional quality or disease resistance is a bad thing. Just that it’s not enough. Never has been. Probably never will be.

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September 8, 2026September 9, 2026

Do crop descriptors really rule the world?

Helen Anne Curry and Sabina Leonelli’s chapter in Agricultural Science as International Development: Historical Perspectives on the CGIAR Era, entitled “Crop Descriptors and the Forging of ‘System-Wide’ Research in CGIAR,” advances a provocative argument: IBPGR’s famous, even iconic, standardized descriptor lists — the shared controlled vocabularies used to record traits like plant height, fruit shape and disease resistance in many genebanks around the world — were never just a neutral book-keeping exercise. By 1997, the authors note, something like 80% of genebank curators were using them. Those that didn’t risked being marginalized and excluded from other activities.

The implication is that what seemed like rather “boring” infrastructure quietly decided which traits got noticed, valued and studied, and thus whose priorities counted in the process of conservation and use of plant genetic resources. But not just conservation and use of plant genetic resources. No, descriptors in effect helped drive CGIAR’s whole research agenda for 30 years:

We argue that the project of producing descriptors both defined and embodied CGIAR institutional identity and objectives as these evolved from the 1970s to the 2000s.

I have some sympathy with some of this, not gonna lie. Standards are never innocent or neutral, and it’s a useful corrective to point out that coding conventions, qualitative state labels and data formats can carry as much institutional power as more seemingly consequential, not to say exciting, technical interventions.

But I think the authors overstate their case. Here’s why.

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September 7, 2026September 7, 2026

Brainfood: Tree conservation from assisted migration to cryo

The potential effect of megafaunal extinctions on modern conservation of horse chestnut Aesculus hippocastanum. The extinction of large seed-dispersing mammals (i.e. elephants) may explain why horse chestnut failed to recolonise Europe after the last ice age, pointing to assisted migration as a conservation option.
Mapping melliferous tree species in Kenya via one-class classification with hyperspectral unsupervised domain adaptation. Hyperspectral remote imagery and fancy maths can accurately identify and locate Kenya’s honey trees, potentially supporting both conservation and beekeeping. Brave new world. Elephants not involved.
Everyday agroecologies in the Mixteca Alta, Mexico: gendered knowledge and practices in homegarden agroecosystem management. Women’s knowledge helps sustain homegardens as reservoirs of agrobiodiversity and climate-adaptation spaces, embedding many interesting wild and cultivated trees, along with much else, in wider systems of knowledge and resource management.
Integrative DNA barcoding and multimethod species delimitation reveal marker performance in the genus Ficus L. (Moraceae). Takes on the old taxonomic problem of where one fig species ends and another begins. Ficus is an especially resonant group for today’s tree-themed roundup: taxonomically challenging, ecologically consequential, economically and culturally important, tied to famously specialised pollination relationships. “Integrative” means the usefulness of a DNA marker must be tested against other evidence and against the particular boundaries one is trying to recognise.
Chloroplast phylogeographic analysis guides the source tracing and conservation strategies of the endangered Magnolia kwangsiensis Moving down one biodiversity level, mapping maternal genetic structure helps identify appropriate seed sources for conservation and restoration, rather than treating all populations as genetically equivalent. Next comes feeding the seeds to passing elephants.
Development of a simple and easily interpretable cultivar identification system using 18 insertion/deletion (InDel) markers in Japanese pummelo (Citrus maxima). Really simple markers can identify Japanese pummelo cultivars, and even reveal clues about their parentage.
К 100-летию отдела генетических ресурсов плодовых культур ВИР. (On the 100th Anniversary of the Fruit Crop Genetic Resources Department of VIR). A century-long institutional case study in tree (ok, and shrub) conservation at scale: some 19,000 fruit, nut and berry accessions now held in field genebanks across ten Russian field stations, each sited in the climate zone that suits what it conserves.
Cryopreservation strategies for trees: Leveraging organogenesis and somatic embryogenesis for effective conservation. Combining ultra-low-temperature storage with making shoots or roots from an explant tissue and making embryo-like structures from non-reproductive cells offers ways to emulate seeds when the real things cannot be easily stored in the usual way, field genebanks cannot be guaranteed to last 100 years, and there are no elephants around.

September 5, 2026September 5, 2026

Data is not the destination

Mike Jackson’s account of the early molecular work at IRRI’s International Rice Genebank is a nice reminder that the idea of the “genomic genebank” (as he calls it) is not as new as it may sounds. In the 1990s, RAPD and AFLP markers were already being used to identify duplicates, reveal genetic structure and, more ambitiously, to predict which accessions might possess useful traits. It’s the continuation of the trajectory I traced in my recent post on descriptors: from names and human-scored traits to photographs, digital phenotypes, molecular markers and now genomic information, each adding a layer of information that makes the collection more searchable and usable. The question keeps shifting from “what do we have?” to “which of what we have might be useful?”

Jackson’s story is also a key piece of the argument I tried to make in another recent post: preserving options is only the beginning. More, and better, information makes options easier to discover, but discovering an option is not the same as exercising it. The harder question is what happens next: how do we turn knowledge about what’s in a collection into actual selection, testing, breeding, adoption and impact? Data can open the door to better use of genebank collections. It cannot walk through it for us.

And there is a danger here. As our information about genebank collections becomes ever more layered, richer and more precise, it can start to look as though we’re solving the problem of use. We are not. We are solving the problem of finding possibilities. That’s only one part of the journey. A genomic prediction is not a breeding line; a photograph is not a phenotype under farmers’ conditions. The distance between knowing an option exists and actually exercising it still has to be travelled. That is a social and institutional process as much as a biological and technological one, and it starts only when the search is over.

September 4, 2026September 9, 2026

When farming worlds collide

When we think about crops moving around the world — and we often do around here — the Columbian Exchange is the canonical example, and why not? The transatlantic movement of maize, potatoes, tomatoes, cassava, and chili peppers to Europe, Africa and Asia, and of wheat, sugar, coffee, and livestock to the Americas, was profoundly transformative. It reshaped global agriculture and diets more dramatically than any single event in human history after the Neolithic.

But similar, if maybe smaller-scale, “exchanges” happened long before 1492. The deep history of agriculture features several ancient “mixing bowls,” let’s call them, where traditions from different geographic origins met and interacted in fascinating ways. These are natural experiments in how new crops become part of diversified farming systems, and I think they can be especially useful in thinking about “opportunity crops.”

Usually, by opportunity crops we mean local or regional crops that were perhaps once more important, and then declined. Or, even if they were never very important, they could still do more, given the chance, whether for diets or incomes, or resilience: indigenous fruits and vegetables, forgotten grains, traditional tubers, you know the kind of thing. Their local resurgence is a crucial path to diversification, for sure. But those agricultural mixing bowls suggest that crops from the outside also have a role in enriching local farming.

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