India protects breeders’ and farmers’ rights

The first registrations are under way in India under the 2001 Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers Rights Act. The Act is India’s sui generis system for the protection of plant varieties as required under the Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights Agreement (TRIPs). As the name implies, however, the law also provides for the granting of Farmers’ Rights, following a vocal campaign by NGOs. There’s a good summary of the provisions here.

The Garden of Eden revisited

The Iraqi wetlands made famous by Wilfred Thesiger as the home of the Marsh Arabs and devastated by Saddam Hussein are apparently making a comeback, thanks to a UNEP “project to restore the network of watercourses which provided inhabitants with water for drinking and farming, and supported the region’s unique ecology.” I’m intrigued by that reference to agriculture. What did (do?) the Marsh Arabs farm? Rice, wheat, barley and millet, as it turns out, although there is apparently another group which specializes in raising the buffalo. But do they still have their traditional crop varieties and livestock breeds? If not, will it be possible to recover at least some of them from genebanks around the world? I hope someone is looking into this.

Coincidentally, from half a world away, comes an example of a genebank helping to restore an indigenous community’s crop genetic resources.

What did Neanderthals eat?

Recent media reports that Neanderthals were occasional cannibals and that women may have accompanied the men on their hunts got me thinking about the Neanderthal diet in general. In particular, did they eat much in the way of plant products at all? While meat was clearly the mainstay of the diet, it does seem from this interesting rebuttal of the hunting women hypothesis that:  

Vegetable foods may well have been part of Middle Paleolithic diets in Eurasia, but these were more like salads, snacks, and desserts than energy-rich staples…Large underground storage organs are common among plant taxa in arid sub-Saharan Africa, but the high-yield edible plant foods of temperate and Mediterranean Eurasia tend to be seeds and nuts that, while potentially nutritious, require more effort to collect and process and thus afford low net yields (Kuhn and Stiner 2006:957).

Wouldn’t it be great to be able to promote some underutilized nut as a Neanderthal dessert? Or perhaps that would not be such a clever idea, given that the Neanderthals died out… Anyway, although some of the information sources listed seem somewhat suspect, there is a compendium of internet resources on the “paleolithic diet” here.

Protecting TK

There seems to have been a breakthrough – procedurally at any rate – at the WIPO discussions in Geneva on protecting traditional knowledge, folklore and expressions of culture (genetic resources are also on the table). Meanwhile, in Abuja, the Nigerian president Olusegun Obasanjo has launched a committee to boost research on traditional medicine.

Geotagging biodiversity

These days, if I’m 10 km NE of Suva on the road to Nausori, Northern Division, Fiji, and want to take a picture of the tropical countryside, after snapping away I can also pull out my little GPS machine and determine my position exactly as degrees of latitude and longitude – 18.075S, 178.525E, as it happens. And that’s much handier for sharing information about geographic locations, something that has become a lot easier – and popular – since the launch of Google Earth. What I’ve just done on the road to Nausori is called geotagging, or georeferencing. That just means adding information about locality – ideally latitude and longitude coordinates – to media like websites, RSS feeds and indeed images. Once your images are geotagged with coordinates and uploaded to Flickr, for example, you can display them in Google Earth – or a geographic information system (GIS) – to show where you took them. Pretty cool way to tell your family about your recent vacation. Soon, digital cameras will have a built-in GPS (many mobile phones already do), and the geotagging will be automatic.

Conservationists are also very keen on geotagging, but geotagging organisms is not as easy as photos. We have huge repositories of specimens of plants and animals at our disposal, both live and preserved, in things like herbaria, natural history museums, botanic gardens and genebanks. And associated with these specimens is usually a certain amount of data: things like the name of the species, the name of the collector, the date the specimen was collected and the place where it was found. These collections and their data are a very precious resource for taxonomy, ecology, conservation, agricultural development and other types of work, but they would be more valuable still if the data were available electronically to a greater extent. Many genebanks and herbaria have not yet placed the information found on the labels stuck on their seed containers and specimens sheets into a database, for example, although to be fair some have, and have even made that information available on-line.

However, even when the label information is digitized, the locality information is very rarely in a form that you can plug directly into Google Earth. That’s because, typically, the locality information – which may have been collected long before the GPS receiver became so readily accessible – doesn’t include latitude and longitude coordinates. It’s much more likely to just have the kind of information I started this post with: “10 km NE of Suva, on road to Nausori, Northern Division, Fiji.” Armed with that kind of text description, a good map, and perhaps some guesswork, you can of course derive the coordinates. But imagine doing that for all the pressed plants or germplasm accessions in even a smallish herbarium or genebank. Doesn’t bear thinking about. And there’s no guarantee that someone else presented with the same locality description in another herbarium or genebank would get the same answer.

Enter the Biogeomancer project. A global consortium of natural history scientists and experts in geospatial data, its goal is to “maximize the quality and quantity of biodiversity data that can be mapped in support of scientific research, planning, conservation, and management.” One of the main ways it does this is by developing tools to automate the geotagging process.

These tools first break down – parse – the textual locality description into its components, and look up the key locality name (Suva, in our example) in electronic gazetteers, which are lists of locality names with their coordinates. They then apply the offset implied by the phrase “10 km NE” to the locality’s coordinates, according to specified methods and standards, even providing an estimate of accuracy. Finally, they validate the results, for example by checking that the final coordinates are on land (assuming the specimen is a terrestrial organism!), between Suva and Nausori, and in the Northern Division of the country called Fiji.

Automated geotagging should cut down the time necessary to process a specimen from 5-10 minutes to fractions of a second, while adding to the repeatability and accuracy of the process. That means that data exchange will be easier, and that it will be possible to combine data coming from different institutions in a single analysis with more confidence that the quality of the data from different sources will be comparable.

Biogeomancer expects to have a “workbench” available to automate georeferencing by the end of 2006. I’m sure many botanists and zoologists will jump on it, but genebanks will probably be a bit behind. They don’t seem as wired into the latest bioinformatics developments as museums and herbaria. Maybe this post will help a bit.