Author: Luigi Guarino

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Keeping up to date with taxonomy made easier

Yesterday I was invited to submit one of my photos to the Flickr pool on Systematic Botany. Yes, I know. The media ought to be alerted. But I point this out less to draw attention to my photographic prowess than to highlight the fact that there is in fact a Flickr pool on Systematic Botany, and that it is a lot of fun. Exploring the discussion forum led me to an old news item about staff at the National Museum Cardiff and Kew naming a whole bunch of new Sorbus species, and not from some isolated corner of the world either, but England and Wales.

Some of these trees have probably developed recently and are examples of on-going evolution of new species. Others are older types which have been known for some time but are only now described as ‘species’ thanks to modern DNA methods.

Some Sorbus species have economic uses, and the taxonomy is made horrendously complicated by rampant hybridization and apomixis.

Coincidentally, IIALD had a piece on a new scheme “supporting and promoting the development of persistent and openly accessible digital taxonomic literature.” I wonder whether making photographs of plants available through Flickr or some other image sharing site might contribute to this worthy cause.

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Yasuní National Park disappoints lovers of crop wild relatives

The Yasuní National Park in Ecuador is apparently the mother of all biodiversity hotspots, “home to the most diverse array of plants and animals in South America and possibly the planet.” And not only that, it may actually continue to be so, unlike many other protected areas.

There are hints that the park could have extra conservation value in a warming world. Yadvinder Malhi, an ecologist at Oxford specializing in the Amazon, said that nearly all climate models simulating the impacts of global warming show the area staying wet even as other parts of the vast basin get drier.

Yeah, but has it got any crop wild relatives, I hear you ask. Well, I asked our friend Julian Ramirez at CIAT, who works with Andy Jarvis. Alas, only one species turns up in Yasuní from the genera of the main South America crops for which he has a decent number of geo-referenced observations (Arachis, Solanum, Phaseolus and Manihot): Manihot brachyloba. Andy, who did his PhD in Yasuní, says he also saw wild cacao and pineapples there. No doubt Julian is putting together the data for those genera as we speak.

Yasuní is of course in the Amazonian lowlands. Wild relatives of Phaseolus and Solanum are in other, nearby protected areas in the Ecuadorian Andes. But that’s another story. For this one: thanks, Julian.

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Featured: A way out of genebank database hell or a siren song?

Simone, Fawzy and Luigi debate the virtues of different approaches to sharing germplasm information:

There are people who need and trust only the database type of information and others who are comfortable, productive and creative with more informal, network type of knowledge sharing. The fact is that the second type of user group has been heavily neglected in the past.

In which user group do you fall?

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How old is that lentil?

You may remember yesterday’s nibble about the allegedly 4,000-year-old lentil from an archaeological site in Turkey which actually germinated. Intrigued, I ran the news item by some colleagues at Kew. They pointed me to a New Scientist article from a few years back which describes their attempt to verify a previous alleged example of very old seed (from the sarcophagus of an Egyptian mummy, in fact) germinating. The thing is, you can predict pretty well how seed will behave over time if you know the temperature and relative humidity of the conditions. You just plug those numbers into a fairly well known and understood equation.

Dickie found that if he started with top-quality seed and the temperature remained constant at 16 °C, one grain in a thousand might still germinate after 236 years. With the temperature sometimes hitting the high 20s, the grain would all be dead in 89 years. And if the seed was less than perfect to begin with…

So let’s just say I’ll be personally needing some fairly solid evidence for the age of that lentil.