- Ann Tutwiler (ex Bioversity DG) on the importance of agrobiodiversity.
- Cherokee Nation may deposit seeds in Svalbard.
- Millionth sample deposited in USDA livestock genebank.
- New grape varieties to be allowed in Bordeaux because of climate change.
- Hawkesbury heritage maize regenerated.
- Some Filipino rice is medicinal.
- Germany designates first CWR genetic reserves in Europe.
Go North, rice!
You might think that Queen’s Line off Drake Road, Chatham, ON N7M 5T1, Canada is the furthest north that rice grows in the world. That’s near Lake Erie, after all.
But you’d be wrong, and so was I. The latitude is 42°19’59.7″N. And there’s rice cultivation in China and central Asia, maybe even Italy’s Po valley, north of the 45th parallel, according to this map. 1
We know the furthest south that rice is grown.
Fact-checking extreme seed-saving
The story of the 800-year old squash seeds has surfaced again. We blogged about it way back, pointing out that it was, in fact, fake. But Archaeology Review does a great job of debunking it yet again. Be careful out there, people.
The spread of agriculture in Europe, genebank edition
A recent Nibble pointed to an image of new, updated map of the expansion of agriculture in Europe. As is usually the case when I see almost any map, I immediately started to think about mashing it up with the localities of genebank accessions. Downloading barley landrace data from Genesys and importing it into Google Earth was easy. And you can also import an image into Google Earth, so it is theoretically possible to superimpose accessions on spread of agriculture.
Unfortunately, the practice is not straightforward, because you have to distort the image by hand to fit neatly on top of the map in Google Earth, and that can take a while. I gave up after about an hour, and after some googling eventually found Map Warper, which does the distortion for you for free. Importing the warped map into Google Maps resulted in a perfect fit.
So here’s the result.
It looks like there are barley landrace accessions from most of the areas highlighted, with dates, in the spread of agriculture map, though they are by no means all equally covered. At least as far as Genesys knows. There have of course been a number of studies looking at the geographic pattern of distribution of genetic diversity in barley in and around Europe. As far as remember, none of them explicitly took into account how long the crop had been in different places. But the material could be available for such a study to be done.
Nibbles: Bean and chili diversity, European Neolithic, Microbiota Vault, Paški sir, Freeze dried potatoes, Rice art, ABS
- Collecting beans in the American SW.
- Chilis too.
- Updated map of Neolithic expansion in Europe.
- The Microbiota Vault is a thing.
- Wind-flavoured cheese.
- But is chuño worth saving, really?
- The art of rice diversity.
- Using Jerry Maguire to explain the Plant Treaty. It is not well done. But one is surprised to see it done at all.