- Psst, wanna breed a cucumber? With video goodness.
- Hudson Valley Seed Library.
- “One duck creates boundless treasure.â€
- Potato spindle tuber viroids go back to the beginning of life on Earth. Kinda.
- AGCommons’ Quick Wins: geospatial technology for smallholder farmers. Via.
New open access breeding journal calls for papers
The Journal of Plant Breeding and Crop Science (JPBCS) is a multidisciplinary peer-reviewed journal published monthly by Academic Journals dedicated to increasing the depth of Crop Science across disciplines with the ultimate aim of improving plant research.
Pisco punched
A blog post at Alcademics.com precipitated a very educational bit of surfing yesterday. I found out about the existence of E Clampus Vitus, a fraternal organization dedicated to the study and preservation of the heritage of the Old West, which of course includes its drinks. I found out that there’s a drink called pisco punch, which I now desperately want to taste. I found out that there’s a dispute between Chile and Peru over the name “pisco.” And I found out that the deadly Pisco earthquake of 2007 destroyed most wineries in the area, though the vineyards (the grape used to make pisco is mainly muscat, but there are other varieties as well) themselves largely survived. What I haven’t been able to find out is how the rebuilding is going. A year ago the news was not good. You can still find pisco on the shelves, so I guess the wineries are back in action. Or is it mainly the Chilean stuff?
Movable feasts
There’s no doubt that climate change poses a huge challenge for in situ conservation of species — including crop wild relatives — in protected areas. I mean, what is one to do, move the park around to follow the species as it tracks the climate? Well, that’s exactly the type of thing that marine biologists are now contemplating for Marine Protected Areas (MPA):
Maybe they’re bigger, … or spaced like stepping stones so species can hopscotch to higher latitudes. Perhaps they’re not tied to a geographic location at all, but follow conditions scientists know are important.
We saw in earlier posts that assisted migration could be another approach. A couple of things are for certain. If protected areas are aimed at individuals species, as opposed to the landscape or ecosystem, we’re going to have to rethink how we define and manage them. And ex situ conservation will be an increasingly important complement to them.
“We set aside parts of the world as if it’s going to be static,” says [Dee] Boersma, at the University of Washington, Seattle. “But the one thing that’s constant is change.”
Amazonian myth-busting
You may remember a piece in SciDev a couple of years back which justly celebrated EMBRAPA’s genebank. There was an brief, intriguing statement towards the end:
This has been done by several indigenous communities — such as the Krahô, Guarani and Indian tribes from the Xingu river basin in Brazil — that approached Embrapa asking for primitive plants seeds that no longer germinate. The species were important not only to their agricultural system but also to their cultural rituals.
I had heard of this “restoration,” of course: a great story, dutifully trotted out when it is necessary to give an example of direct use of genebank materials, one not involving breeders. But it emerged during the meeting I’m attending that the conventional narrative is not quite correct. It turns out that the seeds that were “returned” to the Krahô had actually not been collected from them, but from a neighbouring tribe, in Tocatins. Ok, it is still direct use of ex situ conserved material by indigenous communities, but somehow not as resonant as formerly, at least for me. I hate it when that happens.