- The potential effect of megafaunal extinctions on modern conservation of horse chestnut Aesculus hippocastanum. The extinction of large seed-dispersing mammals (i.e. elephants) may explain why horse chestnut failed to recolonise Europe after the last ice age, pointing to assisted migration as a conservation option.
- Mapping melliferous tree species in Kenya via one-class classification with hyperspectral unsupervised domain adaptation. Hyperspectral remote imagery and fancy maths can accurately identify and locate Kenya’s honey trees, potentially supporting both conservation and beekeeping. Brave new world. Elephants not involved.
- Everyday agroecologies in the Mixteca Alta, Mexico: gendered knowledge and practices in homegarden agroecosystem management. Women’s knowledge helps sustain homegardens as reservoirs of agrobiodiversity and climate-adaptation spaces, embedding many interesting wild and cultivated trees, along with much else, in wider systems of knowledge and resource management.
- Integrative DNA barcoding and multimethod species delimitation reveal marker performance in the genus Ficus L. (Moraceae). Takes on the old taxonomic problem of where one fig species ends and another begins. Ficus is an especially resonant group for today’s tree-themed roundup: taxonomically challenging, ecologically consequential, economically and culturally important, tied to famously specialised pollination relationships. “Integrative” means the usefulness of a DNA marker must be tested against other evidence and against the particular boundaries one is trying to recognise.
- Chloroplast phylogeographic analysis guides the source tracing and conservation strategies of the endangered Magnolia kwangsiensis Moving down one biodiversity level, mapping maternal genetic structure helps identify appropriate seed sources for conservation and restoration, rather than treating all populations as genetically equivalent. Next comes feeding the seeds to passing elephants.
- Development of a simple and easily interpretable cultivar identification system using 18 insertion/deletion (InDel) markers in Japanese pummelo (Citrus maxima). Really simple markers can identify Japanese pummelo cultivars, and even reveal clues about their parentage.
- К 100-летию отдела генетических ресурсов плодовых культур ВИР. (On the 100th Anniversary of the Fruit Crop Genetic Resources Department of VIR). A century-long institutional case study in tree (ok, and shrub) conservation at scale: some 19,000 fruit, nut and berry accessions now held in field genebanks across ten Russian field stations, each sited in the climate zone that suits what it conserves.
- Cryopreservation strategies for trees: Leveraging organogenesis and somatic embryogenesis for effective conservation. Combining ultra-low-temperature storage with making shoots or roots from an explant tissue and making embryo-like structures from non-reproductive cells offers ways to emulate seeds when the real things cannot be easily stored in the usual way, field genebanks cannot be guaranteed to last 100 years, and there are no elephants around.
Towards a digital workflow for forest restoration
I missed the “From Seeds to Success: Digital Tools for Planning and Managing Forest Restoration” webinar a few weeks ago, jointly organized by the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT, the Millennium Seed Bank at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and the Forest Restoration Research Unit (FORRU), Chiang Mai University. Too busy moving to another continent. But fortunately there are now a handy summary and even a recording online. And there will be a re-run.
To remind everyone what the webinar was about:
The programme featured live demonstrations of five innovative digital tools, developed to support restoration planning, seed sourcing and project management, followed by an interactive discussion, during which participants explored their applications, strengths and future development.
With these five tools, therefore, we have the beginnings of a digital seed-to-restoration pipeline. Which is very exciting to me.
Let’s go through it step by step, and tool by tool.
1. Define the restoration objective and choose species: Diversity for Restoration (D4R)
Picture yourself looking at a site you want to restore. This tool answers the question: What should we plant here?
D4R is the front-end decision-support tool. It combines information on:
to recommend suitable species and seed sources.
2. Find the seed: SeedPOD
Then we need to know: Where can we actually obtain suitable seed?
Once D4R has identified desirable species and potentially appropriate provenances, SeedPOD steps up as the seed-sourcing layer, providing information from different organizations worldwide on the storage, availability, and germination of their seed collections. It is scheduled for launch in September 2026.
3. Decide how to handle and store the seed: Wyse–Dickie Seed Storage-Behaviour Predictor
But you won’t necessarily be able to get such information on all the seeds you might need. So how should we handle those seeds?
This tool predicts whether seeds are likely to be:
using species characteristics, taxonomy and environmental variables. That means you can work out how to process and store them.
4. Germinate and produce seedlings: Germination Experiment Assistant (GEA)
Having the seeds is great, but how do we turn them into viable seedlings?
Where there is little or no published germination information, you will need to generate it yourself. GEA uses experimental data and predictive modelling to produce species-specific germination protocols, including practical procedures for nurseries.
5. Track the material through the restoration operation: MyFarmTrees
Finally, once the work has started, you’ll need to monitor how it’s going: What happened to each seed lot, seedling and planting?
MyFarmTrees is the operational backbone of the five tools. It tracks restoration activities from seed collection to nursery production to field establishment using QR-coded seed lots and mobile technology. This gives you traceability. It also creates the possibility of connecting restoration activities to monitoring and ultimately payment-for-ecosystem-services systems and the like.
Is anything missing?
Having these five tools is great, but they don’t quite constitute the entire restoration workflow. They cover the biological-material pipeline extremely well: selection → sourcing → handling → propagation → deployment → monitoring. But the webinar participants did identify restoration approach selection, as well as planning collecting programmes, as gaps in the current digital toolkit. Along with, inevitably, seamless integration, or at least interoperability, of all the different tools.
So there should maybe be an initial stage to the above sequence:
0. Assess the site and restoration strategy
Because before unleashing D4R, you do need to know a bunch of stuff, for example:
And there should also maybe be a stage parallel to what I labelled 2. Find the seed above. Call it…:
2b. Collect the seed
Because if SeedPOD says suitable seed is available, all well and good. But if it isn’t, it would be nice to have a “seed collection planner” to generate a collecting programme for you, factoring in the distribution, ecology, mating system, and phenology of the target species, the accessibility of potential collecting sites, the budget available, you get the idea.
So maybe eventually the complete architecture of the system will be something along these lines:
Interested in seeing where all this goes, as I am? Start by registering for the re-run of the webinar on 30 September.
Nibbles: Festivals, Wheat breeding, Cowpea, Community seed bank, Mint diversity
- Festivals, rituals and seed-saving go hand in hand, as this photo essay on Koraput’s Adivasis shows for World Indigenous Peoples Day.
- Speaking of unlikely alliances, Israeli and Palestinian researchers have teamed up on wheat that can take the heat in a warming, drying Middle East.
- Not to be outdone in the resilience stakes, the cowpea shrugs off both drought and flooding, according to FAO.
- If all this talk of resilient crops has you inspired, here’s a how-to on starting your own community seed bank, in South Africa or anywhere else for that matter.
- And for when preservation is really about nostalgia: Romania’s Buzau genebank is keeping childhood mint flavours alive, chocolate, clove and vanilla notes included.
Nibbles: Museum of Cider, Aport apple, Rattan genebank, Sri Lanka rice, Saudi coffee landscapes
- In the UK, Herefordshire’s Museum of Cider is picking up national recognition for its genebank of heritage apple trees. The BBC’s canonical autumnal apple story comes a little early this year.
- Speaking of iconic apples, Kazakhstan is scaling up efforts to bring back the Aport, the giant heirloom that once made Almaty famous. No word of museums, though. Or cider.
- Over in the Philippines, Department of Environment and Natural Resources is beefing up its rattan genebank to keep pace with demand, with forest stewards in Bukidnon planting seedlings to match. Furniture makers need genebanks as much as cider makers.
- Sri Lanka’s pre-Green Revolution heirloom rice varieties, purana haal, are being eyed for their resilience and disease-management potential. Good thing they’re in the national genebank.
- Saudi Arabia’s Jazan terraced coffee farms are turning into rural and ecotourism hotspots, proving not all agrobiodiversity needs to be in a genebank to survive. But it helps.
Brainfood: Mapping edition
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We’re moving house so this might be the last post for a while. See you on the other side. In the meantime, enjoy this bunch of papers on different applications of spatial analysis to agricultural biodiversity and associated topics.
- Addressing global hotspots of drought-related crop production losses. A crop-specific drought sensitivity metric for 17 major crops finds rainfed production losses of 10% globally under historically observed extremes, enough to feed 2 billion people, with hotspots in the US Midwest, eastern Brazil, the Mediterranean and South Asia. Sustainable irrigation expansion and crop switching could avoid 60% of those losses. No word on varietal change, but I’m sure it would help.
- GEM-Forest: A Global satellite EMbedding–based map of forests and tree crops for 2020. Using Google DeepMind’s Alpha Earth Foundation embeddings, this 10 m global dataset classifies forest, non-forest and tree crop areas with 90% accuracy, showing that lightweight classifiers on satellite embeddings 1 can rival more complex forest-monitoring pipelines built to support things like the EU Deforestation Regulation.
- Global distribution of cattle, horses, goats, sheep and buffaloes at 1 km resolution for 2000–2022 based on subnational census data and spatiotemporal machine learning. Harmonizing 55,336 census polygons across 147 countries produces annual 1 km livestock headcount and density layers for five species, letting users track shifting grazing pressure over more than two decades rather than relying on single-year snapshots. 2
- A Spatial-Econometric Analysis of Fruit Tree Diversity in Lebanon: A contextual framework for supporting smallholder farmers. How geography, socio-economic conditions and local context shape fruit tree diversity in Lebanon, helping identify where interventions could best support smallholder resilience.
- High-resolution mapping of rice cropping pattern, intensity, calendar, and ecosystem type across Southeast Asia. Joins the growing pile of fine-resolution rice products for the region, this one distinguishing not just how many harvests a field gets but which rice ecosystem (irrigated, rainfed, upland) it belongs to. Is which variety is being grown next on the agenda?
- Entrenchment of cropping patterns reinforces climate exposure for certain crops in US. County-level analysis of US cropping decisions finds that climate risk has actually risen for some crops (like rainfed soybeans) even as it fell for others, suggesting economic and policy incentives are keeping farmers planted in increasingly climate-mismatched patterns rather than nudging them toward the drought-sensitivity-driven switching the first paper above models.