Author: Luigi Guarino

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Inter situs conservation unveiled

Following our recent exchange of views on assisted migration, Prof. Vernon Heywood has alerted me to the fact that the latest issue of BGjournal (Vol. 6, No. 1, January 2009) is devoted to ecological restoration.

Amongst the many interesting articles is one on inter situ [sic] conservation which is an issue related to assisted migration. It deals with reintroduction of species to locations outside the current range but within the recent past range of the species unlike assisted migration which deals with the introduction of species (or communities) to areas not at present within their ‘native’ ranges. Both are forms of human-aided translocation of species. On a pedantic note, the correct term for the former should be inter situs not inter situ. I suppose that assisted migration could be viewed as anticipated or predictive inter situs conservation but I would not advocate using such terms.

Another article (by Dixon & Sharrock) in the same issue is on botanic gardens and restoration and includes a Box on the potential and problems of assisted migration.

Perhaps the biggest problem with assisted migration is that while we have various bioclimatic models for predicting species’ distributions under different climates we are not really able to incorporate habitat availability or predict it independently of niche models. We need to know what the habitat and species assemblage (“ecosystem”) are likely to be in the future that we are planning to introduce species into!

It’s not online on the BCGI website yet, but it soon will be.

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Millennial beans

beans

Nice enough beans, ((And thanks to Bisse for letting me use her flickr pic.)) but is the story circulating about them really true?

The story of Anasazi beans varies, depending on who is telling it. In popular mythology, the beans were uncovered by an anthropologist, who discovered a 1,500 year old tightly sealed jar of the beans at a dig in New Mexico. Some of the beans germinated, and the new variety of bean entered cultivation again.

I tried to track the story down, and the closest I got to paydirt, I think, was a passage in Beans: A History by Ken Albala. But even that is pretty vague really. Archaeologists from UCLA somewhere in the midwest in the 1980s, or maybe 1950s, uncover a clay pot sealed with pine tar which they carbon date to 500 BCE. Some of the beans sprout and an intrepid businessman markets them. Yeah, right. To go back to the source of the previous quote:

Since most botanists agree that most beans are unable to germinate after approximately 50 years, it is more probable that the beans remained in constant cultivation in the Southwest, probably in Native American gardens, and that they were picked up by companies looking for new “boutique beans.”

There are plenty of companies marketing Anasazi beans now. But actually it is not impossible for legume seeds to keep their viability for more than 50 years — that’s what genebanks are for. And the dry, relatively cool conditions of an Arizona cave might just be good enough to ensure the survival of a few beans for centuries.

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Nibbles: Book, Moral and physical revulsion, DNA bank, Cacao genome, Cassava, Agroforestry, Dung products, Pork brain

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100 things I’ve done: agrobiodiversity edition

You may have come across the “100 things I’ve done” meme. Jeremy succumbed to it, and a lot of fun it was too reading about it. I’ve just come across a somewhat more specialized version, by a geologist. Maybe there’s room for an agrobiodiversity version? If so, here are ten things that I think should be included, off the top of my head. I haven’t done them all, but I hope to, some day.

  • Harvest (or buy in the supermarket) and then prepare and eat a dish of traditional leafy greens in Africa.
  • Botanize crop wild relatives in the Fertile Crescent.
  • Talk cassava cultivars with the inhabitants of an Amazonian village.
  • Take part in the Ethiopian coffee ceremony at the coffee field genebank near Jimma.
  • See volunteer sweet potato seedlings being protected in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea.
  • Visit the Vavilov Institute.
  • Walk through a milpa at harvest time.
  • Look at potato varieties and wild relatives around Lake Titicaca.
  • Visit the Ifugao rice terraces.
  • Make the pilgrimage up to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.

Leave your suggestions in the comments.

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Aluka on agrobiodiversity

Aluka is an international, collaborative initiative building an online digital library of scholarly resources from and about Africa. ‘Aluka’, is derived from a Zulu word meaning ‘to weave’, reflecting Aluka’s commitment to connect resources and scholars from around the world. In 2008, we announced that Aluka is uniting with JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization building trusted digital archives for the global scholarly community.

An amazing resource, which has a section on African plants, including crops and their wild relatives, e.g. Sorghum.

Access to some things (e.g. photos of herbarium specimens) “is provided through participation by not-for-profit institutions of higher education, as well as secondary schools, public libraries, museums, and other research or cultural institutions across the globe.” Is anyone out there a member? Tell us about it.