Author: Luigi Guarino

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The geography of black rice

Sometimes it pays to spend some time in Genebank Database Hell, if you can fight through the pain.

You may remember a piece recently about the antioxidant properties of black rice. But where does black rice come from? Well, hanging around with the Genesys and GRIN-Global crowd in the past couple of days has allowed me to come up with this map in answer to that deceptively simple question.

In yellow are all the rice accessions from Asia which have coordinates, as recorded in the IRRI database, EURISCO and GRIN. In red are the black rice accessions.

You’d have thought such a map would be pretty easy to make. But you’d be wrong. I had to get an Excel spreadsheet from IRRI with the characterization data, 1 and mash it up with the passport data in Genesys for the same accessions, and then export two separate kmz files and fiddle around in Google Earth. 2 Well, they don’t call it Genebank Database Hell for nothing. But it is getting better, slowly but surely.

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Spatial datasets continue to proliferate, and evolve

A few more huge spatial datasets for you this morning, as I deal with jet-lag in a Maryland hotel room at 4 am.

Today there’s a high resolution dataset of the population of Africa. And an analysis of wetland protected areas. 3 And finally a global dataset of particulate matter pollution. This is presented from a human health perspective, but it could have applications in agriculture too.

Bean production environments in East Africa.

I still want to know who’s keeping track of this stuff. Maybe you don’t need to, you can just google as the need arises, but somehow I doubt it. Would love to hear from the CGIAR’s spatial data consortium folks, if they’re listening.

Meanwhile, one of the participants in that consortium has announced that they’re updating one of their iconic products, the now oldish “Atlas of the Common Bean (Phaseolus vulgaris) in Africa.”

Bean accessions recorded in Genesys.

How long before they mash it up with that population dataset? And with the data on the location of genebank accessions, for example from Genesys.

Not that it hasn’t been done before, in a very crude way, as you can see in the map in Figure 2 below.

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Pavlovsk: you are here

Chaffey’s regular words of wisdom on anything botanical. Well, mostly wise. But more on that later…

That’s from a nibble a few days ago. The qualification concerned Pavlovsk, and Jeremy has now set the record straight. Incidentally, the latest update on the situation from the Vavilov Institute itself has the first decent map of Pavlovsk I’ve seen. Here it is. Explore for yourself: no Street View, alas.

Map of the Pavlovsk Research Station. Yellow: border of the station; Red: border of disputed plots; Green: border of the fruit and berry collection.
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Nibbles: Pavlovsk, Baobab hybridization, Jackfruit, Vavilovia, Cowpea education, Lead, Bees, Banana wilt, Dariy cows, Pavlovsk, Drylands, School gardens, Genetic diversity in botanic gardens

  • The value of Pavlovsk. Jeremy delivers a slap.
  • CIRAD on kinky sex among the baobabs.
  • “I had never heard that there were distinct varieties of the jackfruit, although of course such a thing was reasonable, so I naturally wanted very much to taste one.” Naturally.
  • Wild relative of pea gets a weird hybrid in-ex situ conservation treatment.
  • A Cowpea Story, an illustrative children’s book by Vicky Inniss-Palmer, tells the hopeful story of a cowpea named Catalina and her struggle to overcome illness and disease with the help of scientists. Meanwhile, scientists meet.
  • Urban gardeners, beware lead. And nurture your pollinators.
  • Reading this, anyone would think nobody had ever researched banana Xanthomonas wilt.
  • Improved dairying in Kenya.
  • Vavilov Institute’s comprehensive update on Pavlovsk.
  • ICRISAT to put in place new market-oriented strategy which will use a “systems perspective in setting our priorities to ensure that all important issues along the dryland agriculture value chain are addressed.”
  • Meanwhile, ASARECA asks for ideas on how to intensify one of those dryland systems in the face of climate change.
  • ICIMOD promotes herbal gardens in schools.
  • Botanic gardens get wrists slapped over their inattention to genetics.