Volume 31 of Plant Breeding Reviews is dedicated to Anthony H.D. Brown, the distinguished Australian conservation geneticist. Tony has been making fundamental contributions to the theory of crop genetic resources conservation through his work on sampling strategies, core collections and on farm conservation for forty years. But he has also worked tirelessly in the field, as the following little snippet makes clear:
If you happened to be one of the few vehicles driving the remote dirt Peninsula ‘‘highway’’ in Cape York, north Queensland, in July of 1983, you may have seen three collectors (Ted Hymowitz from Illinois and Jim Grace and Tony from CSIRO) sprawled on the lawn outside the Lakeland pub below the billboard saying ‘‘Ice Cold Beer.’’ This was no early knock off; they actually were sampling rare, tiny Glycine tomentella plants. The billboard had nothing to do with site selection; a collector must check all habitats. The roadside pub, a lone building in the rural landscape, was a haven for the thirsty traveler, and it surrounds a haven for wild plants that grazing animals would otherwise decimate. Thus, sampling strategies for germplasm collection adapt to reality.
You can read the full dedication courtesy of Google Preview. Well worth it. You get to know one of the giants of the field, and there’s a refresher course in the history of crop genetic resources and agrobiodiversity conservation thrown in for good measure.
Regular readers will be familiar with our skepticism here at the Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog about the genetic erosion meta-narrative. Not with the fact that genetic erosion has in fact occurred, and is continuing to occur, of course. Just with the notion that it has occurred everywhere, for every crop, to the overall tune of “75% over the past century.” There’s now news of a further nail in the coffin of that hoary myth.