- Modelling chestnut biogeography for American chestnut restoration. As all 7 species have very similar climatic niches, if you could get a blight-resistant hybrid, it would probably be adapted to North American conditions.
- Ex situ conservation programmes in European zoological gardens: Can we afford to lose them? No, and therefore the EU needs to step in. Whoa, talk about a non sequitur.
- The Fine Scale Ethnotaxa Classification of Millets in Southern India. Malayali farmers can consistently recognize more phenotypes than DNA analysis, and some of the cryptic landraces might be really useful.
- Diversity of cassava (Manihot esculenta Crantz) cultivars and its management in the department of Bouenza in the Republic of Congo. High, but decreasing, at least in some villages. But overall? Any collections made?
- Indigenous agroforestry in a changing context: The case of the Erumanen ne Menuvu in Southern Philippines. Despite being divinely-sanctioned, the pengegnewiran swidden system is changing, in response to socio-economic changes. It needs to, and blaming the people because you don’t like the result is not very helpful.
- Variation in biochemical composition of baobab (Adansonia digitata) pulp, leaves and seeds in relation to soil types and tree provenances. Soil has a big effect. At least in Benin.
- Comparing silvopastoral systems and prospects in eight regions of the world. They’re all going to need more active management.
Rice morphological diversity 1, Bloggers 0
Ruaraidh Sackville Hamilton of the IRRI genebank points out we are confusing clustered spikelets with multi-grained spikelets. Sorry.
Clustered spikelets are more common, and are recognized in the rice descriptors. We have 254 such varieties from 26 countries, mostly in S and SE Asia. Spikelets may be borne directly on the long primary branches of the panicle and/or on short secondary branches, in varying proportions. If none are directly on primary branches, or on the short secondary branches, they appear as clusters of three spikelets. See fig. 8 in the 2008 rice descriptors publication.
The multi-grained spikelets noted by Zakir are more unusual – multiple grains in single spikelets.
Old literature on developmental anatomy concludes that rice spikelets are primitively three-grained, of which the two lateral have become vestigial (hence “sterile lemma”). It would be interesting to know if the multi-grained spikelets are a reversion to primitive type, or a new splitting of the central grain.
Nibbles: Forests and agriculture, Seed collecting, Banana book, Fermentation, Cucumber history, Myrrh, Farm systems, Dog genetics, Chocolate wars
- Seven forest myths exposed. And more on the work debunking one of them. Yeah I know we already Nibbled it, get over it.
- And you know what, here’s another one we already Nibbled, on collecting seeds in Central Asia. But I just read it again in the hardcopy version and it’s really cool and I like seeing people I know in funny shorts. Incidentally, the dead tree version has a link to Vaviblog that is unaccountably missing online.
- Will no one buy me this fabulous banana book? (Not if you keep being rude to your reader. Ed.)
- Second installment of that we-farm-because-we-like-beer thing. I’m not sure about the theory, but I like the way this guy writes. Yes, it’s a little look at me, look at me. But sometimes you need that.
- Tales of the cucumber. Does anyone remember if we blogged about this paper?
- More to myrrh than meets the eye. And more than most folk need to know.
- Oxford boffins say a pox on both your houses: “environmentally friendly” farms better than conventional and organic.
- National Geographic tackles the dog. Amazingly, all the photos are of, ahem, dogs.
- What’s with all this stuff about cacao lately? Has someone sequenced another variety or something?
Looking for a (double) grain in a seedbank
Thanks to Mike Jackson for taking up the challenge of finding more examples of double-grained rice. He got in touch with friends at his old stomping grounds in the IRRI genebank, and the indispensable Ms Flora de Guzman there, who heads of that genebank past and present will I’m sure forgive me for saying actually runs the place, ((I’m reliably informed that at an IRRI Christmas dinner, she was the only staff member who could identify the precise variety of all 6 dishes of cooked rice that they were presented with.)) came up with a variety from Nepal called Laila Majnu. This was sent to IRRI in 1981, and is conserved in the genebank as accession IRGC 59101 (and incidentally safety duplicated at Svalbard). The fact that IRGC 59101 (which is pictured below, thanks to Ms de Guzman again) is a bit of a strange morphological variant isn’t mentioned in the genebank database, however. Not the electronic version, anyway. Ms de Guzman simply remembered the variety and dove back into her notebooks to find it. Next time I think about venturing into Genebank Database Hell, I want her as my guide…
Collecting Missions Repository gets an upgrade
I don’t want to get a reputation as a curmudgeonly old coot ((That horse has left the stable. Ed.)), so let me grasp an opportunity that has fallen into my lap to trumpet a small but significant improvement in conditions down in Genebank Database Hell.
I have on occasion noted that if you wanted to share a link to one of the historical collecting mission reports catalogued in the Collecting Missions Repository, you wouldn’t be able to. No permalink, see? You had to provide the code number of the collecting mission and leave your interlocutor to do the rest, as we did in a recent post on wild Brassica, for example.
No longer. I have been informed, and have verified the fact, that each report now has a handy permalink, reachable from the metadata page.
Let me be the first to congratulate the developers. Would that the folks at Climate Analogues were so obliging…