Forests & trees

May 16, 2017May 16, 2017

Kew helping protect your morning joe

Remember a short blog post from seven years back saying how Ethiopia had just protected some wild coffee forests?

We Nibbled yesterday a UN press release saying that a Biosphere Reserve had been created in Ethiopia to protect wild coffee. But actually it turns out that it is no less than TWO reserves that have just been selected by UNESCO, Kafa and Yayu. Many thanks to Tadesse Woldemariam Gole for the tip.

No, I didn’t think so. But anyway, here’s the latest on that, courtesy of the coffee team at Kew.

In April 2015 we started the three year project ‘Mainstreaming biodiversity conservation and climate resilience at Yayu Biosphere Reserve (Ethiopia)’. In this project, poverty alleviation, biodiversity, and climate resilience, are inextricably linked.
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The project has now been running for almost two years, and despite a few surprises, is achieving considerable success. Catch-up on our progress in the second part of this post, available in the coming months.

Previous experience in this sort of thing has been mixed, so I’m looking forward to hearing more. In the coming months.

May 11, 2017

Nibbles: Rice in Trinidad, Sweet potatoes in Ethiopia, EU crop diversity double, Sir Peter on the ginkgo, Forages, Brazilian peanuts, Seed moisture, Phenotyping double, Svalbard deposit, CATIE data, Herbarium double, Seed #resistance, Father of the apple, Agave congress

African rice out of Africa, and out of the genebank.
The other way around for sweet potato.
Markers for micronutrients. And diversity for taste…
The deep history of the ginkgo.
Study plants to decrease the effects of burping.
Brazil rationalizes peanut collections.
Measuring moisture in seeds.
Big data for better seeds. And not only in Iowa.
NZ seeds in Svalbard.
CATIE on Genesys.
Oz biosecurity fail. Better stick to online.
I want to be a seed rebel too.
Maybe in Kazakhstan?
Agave under the volcano under the cosh.

May 8, 2017May 8, 2017

Brainfood: Cannabis roundup, Citrus genomes, Mapping Africa, Maize diversity, Qat diversity, Language diversity, Apple taste, Coconut diversity, Napier grass review, Rangeland management, Chinese goats, Arabica evaluation, Bangladeshi chickens, Seed endophytes

Cannabis Domestication, Breeding History, Present-day Genetic Diversity, and Future Prospects. The weed is in trouble, man. Just one of the papers in a very special issue of Critical Reviews in Plant Sciences. And for a historical perspective…
Genomic analyses of primitive, wild and cultivated citrus provide insights into asexual reproduction. Apomixis is down to a “miniature inverted-repeat transposable element insertion in the promoter region of CitRWP.”
Automated cropland mapping of continental Africa using Google Earth Engine cloud computing. Croplands increased by 1 Mha/yr between 2003 and 2014.
Genetic diversity and population structure of native maize populations in Latin America and the Caribbean. Three groups: Mexico + southern S. America, lowland Mesoamerica + Caribbean, Andes.
Phylogeography of the wild and cultivated stimulant plant qat (Catha edulis, Celastraceae) in areas of historical cultivation. Centres of origin in Kenya and Ethiopia, with limited movement between the two, but some hybrids in N. Kenya; the Yemeni stuff came from Ethiopia.
Process-based modelling shows how climate and demography shape language diversity. If you assume human groups split after reaching a certain population size, and rainfall limits population density, you can predict language diversity in Australia.
Volatile Compound Profiles of Malus baccata and Malus prunifolia Wild Apple Fruit. Look at the esters.
Genetic diversity, population structure and association analysis in coconut (Cocos nucifera L.) germplasm using SSR markers. I can’t see much new here. Please, coconut experts, tell me what I’m missing.
Opportunities for Napier Grass (Pennisetum purpureum) Improvement Using Molecular Genetics. Could do better.
Heterogeneity as the Basis for Rangeland Management. Gotta mix it up.
Analysis of genetic diversity of Chinese dairy goats via microsatellite markers. The locally developed breeds are all derived from a single European breed.
Variation in bean morphology and biochemical composition measured in different genetic groups of arabica coffee (Coffea arabica L.). You can’t use morphology to predict taste.
Breeding for the improvement of indigenous chickens of Bangladesh: evaluation of performance of first generation of indigenous chicken. I don’t understand this much, but I liked the names of the genotypes: Naked Neck, Hilly and Non-descript Desi.
Persistence of endophytic fungi in cultivars of Lolium perenne grown from seeds stored for 22 years. It’s a record!

May 7, 2017May 3, 2017

Targeting germplasm in an age of climate change

Let me expand a little on yesterdays’s teaser about the Seedlot Selection Tool.

Say you have an accession of maize, for example, collected 20 years ago, for example, somewhere in the middle the NW zone of Mexico defined by Orozco-Ramírez, Perales & Hijmans (2017), for example.

Say that you’d like to know where you could grow that material 20 years from now.

Say you have a few minutes to learn how to use the USDA’s Seedlot Selection Tool.

This is what you would get, more or less, depending on the details.

The blue dot is your collecting site, the red bits are the places where that material will be adapted in 2040. And you can run the thing the other way around too. That is, given that you want to grow something in 2040 where that blue dot is now, where would you have to have collected it in the past?

The Seedlot Selection Tool seems to be aimed primarily at forest and landscape managers, but I see no reason why it couldn’t be used in agricultural applications too, as above, subject to the same provisos.

The Seedlot Selection Tool (SST) is a web-based mapping application designed to help natural resource managers match seedlots with planting sites based on climatic information. The SST can be used to map current climates or future climates based on selected climate change scenarios. It is tailored for matching seedlots and planting sites, but can be used by anyone interested in mapping climates defined by temperature and water availability. The SST is most valuable as a planning and educational tool because of the uncertainty associated with climate interpolation models and climate change projections. The SST allows the user to control many input parameters, and can be customized for the management practices, climate change assumptions, and risk tolerance of the user.

Would love to get my hands on a global version.

May 6, 2017May 4, 2017

Deconstructing restoration

Just to remind ourselves that conserved seeds are not just there to be used in breeding, let us “deconstruct symbolic promises of fertility and rebirth carried by domesticated seeds and look at the reality of the seeds that have never been at our service,” think as holistically as we can, and consider taking the MOOC on “Landscape Restoration for Sustainable Development: a Business Approach.” And, if we live in the western bit of North America, let us play around with the USDA’s Seedlot Selection Tool too.