Category: Featured

Shelagh tells us more about the Habitats Directive and CWRs:

You may be interested to know that a few years back I carried out some analysis of the number of CWR included in the annexes of Habitats Directive. The results can be found in Chapter 5 of the text book, Crop Wild Relative Conservation and Use for those that have a copy. I’m not supposed to circulate the pdf but since it may be of interest, I’ve extracted the relevant pages, but note now that I can’t add an attachment here.

Read more here. And here’s the extract: Kell_etal_2008_extract

After some kind words of encouragement for your faithful bloggers, as they plow their lonely furrow, Pablo unleashes hell on the genetic erosion meta-narrative:

I hope we can finally move beyond the unsubstantiated pseudostats on worldwide erosion of crop genetic diversity, more important and easier to quantify would be how much is being used in production systems where and by whom. Also there is the question of whether it is forever lost or can be recovered or expressed in new cultivars and crosses or in new environments.

As we’ve seen, that quantification of diversity in production systems could be done by looking at landrace names. Or could it?

Jacob has an idea why using climate data won’t always make the haystack smaller:

To me, the potato results mean that we shouldn’t be looking at selection, but at migration and drift. Selection reduces diversity, migration and drift determine where it goes.

Nigel on reducing the size of the haystack:

The case of potatoes is very interesting indeed, but is it typical? There are numerous papers showing that using ecogeography as a predictor of patterns of genetic diversity does not always work, but ecogeography is still widely used because in the absence of clear genetic diversity or characterisation/evaluation data there is practically no alternative.

Practically no alternative, or no practical alternative? There is a difference.

Dirk tracks down Meyer’s giant peach in situ:

The giant is alive and well. The Feicheng peach is also known as Buddha peach…

Read more, you know you want to!