Genebanks

April 20, 2015April 20, 2015

Nibbles: Svalbard double, AgAtlas upgrade, Ornamental database, Wild apples, Genetic garden, Sandalwood trade, Amazon dams, Body bacteria, ICRISAT blog, African greens, Aquatic camel, Mujer empowerment

More of a proper catch-up Nibbles later, but these should hold you for a while.

Le Figaro goes to Svalbard.
But Wired goes into much more depth on the tragic situation in Syria.
Many AgAtlas pages now include interactive mapping and data download, eg AEZ. About time :)
Looking for information on varieties of ornamental plants? Look no further.
Diversity in wild European apples: past, present and future.
Genetic garden opens in Bangalore.
The perils of sandalwood smuggling.
Dam the Amazon, full speed ahead! What will happen to all that human body bacteria diversity?
ICRISAT’s new DG has a blog. Looking forward to his first foray into the genebank.
Lots of stuff on African traditional veggies in AVRDS’s latest newsletter.
The swimming camels of Gujarat get protection. I’d pay money to see them, I really would.
Patagonian women farmers are doing it for themselves, at last.

April 20, 2015April 20, 2015

Vanuatu field collections survive cyclone

A smidgen of good news from the Pacific island country of Vanuatu, recently hit so cruelly by Cyclone Pam. This just in ¹ from Roger Malapa, who’s in charge of the various field genebanks at the Vanuatu Agricultural Research and Technical Centre (VARTC) on the beautiful island of Santo, which was apparently less badly affected than others.

Minor damage to the banana collection but overall, everything is fine at VARTC and Santo. Yes there is enough material in the multiplication plots, mainly the root crops. I have just selected an early maturing variety on February: two-month harvest. We are harvesting our cassava now so cuttings can be prepared.

SPC’s Centre for Pacific Crops and Trees (CePaCT) does hold duplicates of some of these collections in vitro. But you can never have enough safety duplication in the Pacific.

Here’s what a bit of the root and tuber crop collection at VARTC looked like a few years ago when I last visited.

santo

April 6, 2015April 6, 2015

Brainfood: Resilience and diversity, Cold tolerant rice, Old baobabs, VIR, Local adaptation, Prunus phylogeny, Bactris mating, Land use change, Wheat landraces, Amazonian agrobiodiversity

Does Plant Species Richness Guarantee the Resilience of Local Medical Systems? A Perspective from Utilitarian Redundancy. It depends on how knowledge is distributed.
COLD1 Confers Chilling Tolerance in Rice. From a wild relative.
Searching for the Oldest Baobab of Madagascar: Radiocarbon Investigation of Large Adansonia rubrostipa Trees. 1,600 years seems to be the record.
Genetic resources of cultivated plants as the basis for Russia’s food and environmental security. VIR needs Roubles 425 million a year ($14.3 million).
Using archaeogenomic and computational approaches to unravel the history of local adaptation in crops. Models say that adaptation to higher latitudes was rapid, simple (few genes) and unstable.
Combining conservative and variable markers to infer the evolutionary history of Prunus subgen. Amygdalus s.l. under domestication. Almonds and peaches were domesticated on either side of the Central Asian Massif from different sections of the genus that had been there for 5 million years.
Conservation implications of the mating system of the Pampa Hermosa landrace of peach palm analyzed with microsatellite markers. Bactris effective population size in genebanks is too small.
Global effects of land use on local terrestrial biodiversity. Within-sample total terrestrial species diversity down by 13.6% globally. About the same for crop wild relatives?
Exploiting genetic diversity from landraces in wheat breeding for adaptation to climate change. It would be a good idea.
Household Agrobiodiversity Management on Amazonian Dark Earths, Oxisols, and Floodplain Soils on the Lower Madeira River, Brazil. Age of household head, size of household and area of land under cultivation predict amount of agricultural biodiversity managed.

April 4, 2015April 2, 2015

Nibbles: Local earthworm, Public-private, Cassava double, Food prices, Amazonian rubber, Mongolian ag, Pacific roots, Potato CWR, Ugandan plantain, Galician brassicas, Contesting agronomy, Silver bullet

Lamb ham: an easter tradition we can all get behind.
Indian researchers market a new earthworm. Not to bring you down or anything.
PPP are the new black. It says here.
Cassava gets Big Data treatment. That’s kinda biotechnology too. But then you have to commercialize the stuff, right?
“Food price shocks are both a determinant and effect of conflict.”
Recognizing the “rubber soldiers”.
Chinese experts tell Mongolians how to be more resilient to climate change. I hope it works out for them.
New potato and sweet potato varieties for the Pacific come to CePaCT.
Any of those potato varieties benefit from wild relatives?
New plantain variety for Uganda.
Galician genebank gets old brassicas. National genebank unavailable for comment. Actually, national genebank unavailable.
“We can see the blinkered promotion and systematic ‘bigging-up’ of individual agricultural technologies, and their real or imagined impacts, as a direct result of the uncritical acceptance of the language of ‘impact at scale’.”
Biotechnologist says we need biotechnology to feed world. QED.

April 1, 2015April 1, 2015

Complementary potato conservation in the Parque de la Papa

I was in South America for the past couple of weeks, which is why blogging has been, well, slow. One of the places I visited was the Parque de la Papa, or Potato Park, near Cusco in Peru, thus fulfilling a long-standing ambition. The Parque brings together six local communities around the imperative to conserve local potato diversity, both wild and cultivated, and use it sustainably. They raise money through ecotourism, including a restaurant serving local delicacies, but also through action research projects. One of the more important things that’s been happening is the “repatriation” of virus-free landraces from the genebank of the International Potato Centre (CIP), including with support from the International Treaty.

CIP staff have also been training local people in the production of botanical seed, as part of a project implemented by the Asociación ANDES with support from the Global Crop Diversity Trust. The seed is being stored in a community genebank, but will be safety duplicated at CIP, and hopefully also eventually in Svalbard. The photo shows Pedro doing a demonstration of how seeds are extracted from fruits for storage. The guy on the right is Alejandro Argumedo of ANDES. Really good to see ex situ and on farm conservation working together and complementing each other, as they should.