- Bamboo microscope used to document rice varieties at Indian village genebank. Want one.
- And more documentation and conservation of traditional knowledge in India: this time it’s medicines.
- Nigel Chaffey’s latest botanical buffet table at the Annals of Botany has stuff on nomenclature and genomes. Always worth following.
- Latest on saving agarwood. And more. Thanks to twittering by @AsiaForestry.
- Biofortified blogs research on geneflow between crops and their wild relatives.
- Kentucky bluegrass pix. Botany Photo of the Day is also worth following. You guys all use Google Reader, right?
- “Any serious discussion of biodiversity conservation must include the diversity of crops and livestock…” Right on.
- Vavilov hits Abyssinia. Another one for Reader.
- Pollinator trends in Europe and the world. It ain’t good.
- Your botanic gardens needs at least 15 individuals of that palm.
Where the (European) buffalo roam
Again from Michael Kubisch.
The European bison or wisent, like its North American counterpart, has faced near extinction during its recent history. Both species have been brought back from the brink starting with relatively small populations — in the case of the European bison perhaps with fewer than 50 individuals. The wisent population now numbers somewhere over 3000, but these animals suffer from low genetic diversity and are furthermore separated into a relatively large number of often very small and isolated herds. This is problematic because it is thought that the survival of a species depends on a minimum number of breeding individuals, although there isn’t necessarily much agreement on what that number needs to be.
There is consensus, however, that the fractured nature of the European bison population is unlikely to guarantee its long-term survival. What is needed is a larger breeding population containing perhaps as many as a thousand individuals. Fortunately, it isn’t necessary for these animals to belong to a single contiguous population, as long as smaller populations exist on stretches of connected land that enable them to come into contact with each other. But even that requires suitable land and lots of it — not an easy quest on a crowded continent.
But there is hope. In a recent study described in the journal Conservation Biology, a multinational group of researchers has determined that the Carpathian Mountains could provide a possible habitat for a wisent metapopulation. This area already contains a number of smaller herds, has the type of vegetation wisent seem to like and (in part thanks to a decrease in human population pressures), and consists of relatively large tracts of suitable land. Implementing this idea would obviously require both existing herds to be enlarged and new ones to be established. Whether the means can be found to accomplish this is hard to predict, but there is no doubt that it would constitute a significant step towards preserving one of Europe’s most magnificent herbivores.
Featured: More origins
Dave Wood muses on the successional stage of crop progenitors and the origins of agriculture:
…if early crops were directly derived from massive pure stands of wild relatives, then such crops have an ecological heritage of stability. If so, we can now stop worrying about stability based on diversity in agro-ecosystems and start worrying about just what factors once determined the obvious stability of climax vegetation of crop relatives of our major cereals.
Crop improvement in the news
Two stories of collaborative crop improvement — past, present and future — and the genebanks that underpin it to end the week with.
From an IRRI press release out today on IRRI’s collaboration with the Philippines:
Filipino farmers have adopted more than 75 IRRI-bred high-yielding rice varieties since 1960, have greatly improved their fertilizer and pest management strategies, and are implementing water-saving technologies.
It is telling that a particular point is made of the Filipino material in the IRRI genebank.
…in the International Rice Genebank housed at IRRI, 4,670 rice samples from the Philippines are conserved, including 4,070 traditional varieties, 485 modern varieties, and 115 wild relatives — all are available to share with Filipino farmers and scientists.
And from USDA’s Agricultural Research magazine, Feb. 2010 edition:
Of 1,768 heirloom wheats submitted since 2005, only 78 (or 4.4 percent) showed resistance to Ug99 at the Njoro site. Still, the prescreening led to identification of more Ug99-resistant wheat accessions than would’ve been achieved from sending randomly selected accessions for testing, says Bonman. This is evidenced by the fact that 7 percent of wheat lines resistant to U.S. races showed rust resistance in Kenya, yet only 1 percent of randomly selected accessions did.
I’ll be travelling for the next couple of weeks and blogging may be sparse.
Where will all those vegetable seeds come from?
I haven’t seen official figures on production or acreage — I’m not even sure if they exist — but if internet buzz and celebrity hype is anything to go by we’ve clearly been going through a revolution in vegetable gardening during the past couple of years. Well, would you believe a resurgence of interest? Schools are certainly interested. Michelle Obama is, famously, interested. The next step will no doubt be the digging of tilapia ponds on the White House lawn.
Just today there were pieces on this from the US and the UK. But what I would really be interested to know is to what extent all these “new” gardeners, including the First Lady, are using heirloom seeds. Is there demand for them? And if so, is it being met by supply?
The Royal Horticultural Society has put out a call for heirloom vegetable seeds in Wales. Is it because it fears for their continued existence, or because enough seed is not available to meet sky-rocketing requests?
Seeds discovered through the scheme will be redistributed through local seed-swaps and also through the Heritage Seed Library run by Garden Organic in Coventry.
Given the recent news about the “official” national vegetables genebank in the UK, one does have to be thankful for things like the Heritage Seed Library, and its American cousin Native Seed Search. Maybe Michelle can be persuaded to Adopt-a-Crop.