Those happy few, that band of brothers, who follow us on Twitter will know that the Tropical Rainforest Heritage of Sumatra is IUCN’s Protected Area of the Week. It is actually three protected areas: the Gunung Leuser National Park, the Kerinci Seblat National Park and the Bukit Barisan Selatan National Park. Great for Indonesia’s largest mammals, apparently, and I asked the question in my tweet whether they are equally good for wild rices.
Quick as a flash, Nora Castaneda at CIAT produced a map of wild rice accessions from Sumatra, based on IRRI data. Turns out two accessions of Oryza officinalis have been collected from the Gunung Leuser National Park. That’s the northernmost of the three protected areas, shown in pink.
GIBF doesn’t add much, unfortunately. But there could well be a number of other wild rice relatives in these parks. That we don’t know, or at any rate that it is pretty difficult to find out, is really an indictment of the disconnect between the agrobiodiversity and nature conservation communities.