- Can cultivated species get their own Red List? Stefano Padulosi asks the tough questions.
- Açaí: could the wonder fruit also be wonderful for forests? CIFOR asks the tough questions.
- And more: You mean you can eat that?
- Horticulture has rock stars? My turn to ask the tough questions.
- Ok, so what US county is “…a hotbed of diversified, small-scale organic, natural processed food production”? Maybe not so tough.
- Will there be a follow-up to Lancet’s 2008 series on malnutrition? That’s an easy one.
- Luigi’s mother-in-law asks: Where can I get my hands on that drought-resistant tea?
- Got any other questions? World Wide Views on Biodiversity wants to hear from you, this Saturday. (Answers too, I suppose.)
IUCN and Microsoft map threats to biodiversity
“We’re building an application that allows people to map those threats spatially,” Joppa explains. “We’re trying to provide a repository of evidence for threats to species.”
Lucas Joppa is talking about a collaboration between Microsoft and IUCN to map threats to biodiversity. Worth keeping an eye on. But I wonder if they’ll consider agrobiodiversity too. If so, we have some ideas here at the blog. Anyway, presumably the thing will link up with GeoCAT in some clever way.
LATER: And also link to this? Or at least suck in the data?
Brainfood: Wild soybean, Leafy vegetables collection gaps, Banana drought tolerance screening, Chinese soybean breeding, Malagasy coffee collections, Bacteria on beans
- Perennial Glycine: A new source of genetic diversity for soybean improvement. The perennial wild species are genetically and geographically distant from the crop, but at least one can be crossed, with some difficulty, and some potentially useful genes have been enticed to make their way into the cultivated genome. To no great effect, but it’s early days yet.
- Genetic resources collections of leafy vegetables (lettuce, spinach, chicory, artichoke, asparagus, lamb’s lettuce, rhubarb and rocket salad): composition and gaps. You can just read the collecting priorities for each genepool, or analyze the data yourself.
- Screening the banana biodiversity for drought tolerance: can an in vitro growth model and proteomics be used as a tool to discover tolerant varieties and understand homeostasis? Maybe.
- Development of yield and some photosynthetic characteristics during 82 years of genetic improvement of soybean genotypes in northeast China. Yield doubled, but at the cost of water use efficiency. Maybe those perennials could help?
- An assessment of the genetic integrity of ex situ germplasm collections of three endangered species of Coffea from Madagascar: implications for the management of field germplasm collections. For 3 wild species, there’s lots of genetic diversity in field genebanks, but also lots of crossing with other species.
- Diversity of culturable bacteria and occurrence of phytopathogenic species in bean seeds (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) preserved in a germplasm bank. “…the fact that potentially phytopathogenic bacteria have been preserved in a genebank should emphasize the importance of rigorous sanitary controls for plant genetic resources.” You think?
Geospatial Conservation Assessment Tool put through its paces
A random tweet from Stefano Padulosi at the big IUCN conference in Korea alerted me to the existence of something called GeoCAT. Funny how you can follow a topic assiduously and still miss important stuff and then come across it entirely by chance. Anyway, GeoCAT is an online tool developed by Kew and Vizzuality, with support from IUCN and others, that “performs rapid geospatial analysis for Red List assessment.” 1
It all starts by providing some species occurrence data. You can import data from GBIF or, interestingly, Flickr. Or you can upload your own data. Or you can add or edit points on the map itself. All three options seem to work fine. Then you have to click on a little button labelled “Enables EOO/AOO.” It took me some time to figure that out. What that does is it uses the occurrence data to calculate two things: Extent of Occurrence (EOO) and Area of Occupancy (AOO). “These two measures are the foundation of the ‘B’ criterion of the IUCN Red List system.” I’ll let Wikipedia define them:
The EOO can best be thought of as the minimum convex polygon encompassing all known normal occurrences of a particular species, and is the measure of range most commonly found in field guides. The AOO is the subset of the EOO where the species actually occurs. In essence, the AOO acknowledges that there are holes in the distribution of a species within its EOO, and attempts to correct for these vacancies. A common way to describe the AOO of a species is to divide the study region into a matrix of cells and record if the species is present in or absent from each cell.
That done, you click on “Print complete report” and that opens another browser tab which has a map of the occurrences, the EOO and AOO figures, and a preliminary assessment of threat, according to the IUCN system. What it doesn’t have, is a reference to what species you’re dealing with, but the thing is still in Beta, they’ll work such things out in due course. You can also download the results for use in Google Earth, from whence I derived the following, for Cicer judaicum, as it happens.
No, I don’t know if that lone record off to the east is valid, but fear not, if you think it’s suspect, you can easily edit it out. Not bad. Not bad at all.