Author: Luigi Guarino

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Nibbles: Seed movement edition

  • From Indigenous communities, to Carol and Robert Mouck, to the Sisters of Providence of St. Vincent de Paul Motherhouse, to the Kingston Area Seed System Initiative and Ratinenhayén:thos: seed rematriation in Canada.
  • Simran Sethi gets to the bottom of the COVID seed sales surge.
  • And more on the same from Dan Saladino.
  • There’s been quite a surge in quinoa in the past few years. All presentations here.
  • And the potato has been getting around too of course. The podcast of the book.
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Exploring Afghanistan’s wheat

There’s a new paper on the geographic distribution of wheat cultivation in Afghanistan. You can explore the data online. But here’s the bottom line, the paper’s Fig. 9.

I downloaded the cultivated wheat data from Genesys and imported everything into QGIS to play around with. That’s almost 5,000 genebank accessions, about half of which are geo-referenced. Here’s the result.

Circles are all cultivated wheats, red dots everything that is not bread wheat. Note the irrigated areas (dark blue) are more likely to have modern varieties, and that the area of rainfed cultivation (bright green) varies considerably from year to year with precipitation. Probably some more collecting to be done then, in particular in the rainfed northwestern region, based on this map. But I’m not going to bet on that until I see whereVIR’s 570-odd Afghan wheats were collected.