A new series of booklets ‘African Priority Food Tree Species’ offers an important step in gathering existing information together, offering a synthesis of 11 priority food tree species native to sub-Saharan Africa, such as the Baobab and the Shea Butter tree. The series also includes recommendations for their conservation and sustainable use.
And very nice the results look too. But what the series of booklets also offers is a bit of an overlap with the Agroforestree Database. See for yourself for Blighia sapida: the SAFORGEN booklet vs the pdf you get from the Agroforestree database.
One does wonder to what extent Bioversity and ICRAF worked together on this, in the spirit of the shiny new CGIAR.
Bioversity and ICRAF are working together and we are thinking about how to work together more. Undoubtedly we could have demonstrated better teamwork in the past, but at least in the tree genetics area, we are now aspiring to be as collaborative as the spirit of the shiny new CGIAR suggests. If you look carefully at the authorship of the booklets, you will note that the Ziziphus leaflet was written by ICRAF. With respect to the obvious overlap, if you conduct a quick Google search on Marius Ekue, you will see that he is the author of many articles on Blighia sapida; in fact he is considered an expert on that species. If the booklet that he authored in this series includes much of the same informatiion as the Agroforestree Database, it is probably accidental and I would have high confidence in the accuracy of both sources.
Thanks for that, Judy. So could you briefly highlight the kind of information that is available in these booklets that one cannot find in the database. Or vice versa?