- “Beginning in the late 1990s, Kock travelled throughout Ontario collecting twigs of seemingly healthy mature elms, in what amounted to an elm dating service.”
- “…a curated inventory of miscellaneous interestingness” lands on the Millennium Seed Bank. Hilarity ensues.
- What do hopscotch, architecture and maize have in common?
- Zebras good for cattle.
- The fig deconstructed.
- “Improve yields through crop diversity…” ??? Who are these people?
- Crops for the Future bemoans the loss of “a spineless variety of Solanum quitoense.” Someone, somewhere must still have it, surely.
- Mangos: Haiti’s new best friend?
- Home-bred eggplants. Or aubergines.
- “Urban agriculture in Japan, cultivating sustainability and well being.” Again? Still?
- West Africa to get bunch of specialist biotechnology centres for crop improvement. No word on where the existing national genebanks fit in. Nor, ahem, what role IITA, ICRISAT and the other CGIAR Centres are going to play in all this.
In-flight agrobiodiversity entertainment
Interesting to see that one can watch the germplasm collecting documentary Seed Hunter on Turkish Airlines now. That must count as some form of mainstream.
Building a plant conservation toolkit
70 per cent of the genetic diversity of crops including their wild relatives and other socio-economically valuable plant species conserved, while respecting, preserving and maintaining associated indigenous and local knowledge.
That would be Target 9 of the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation, and we are all fully behind it, and all the others, of course. How to do it, though? Well, the new Plants 2020 website is planning to provide a toolkit in due course. ((Not a clearing-house, I am advised.)) When? Well:
Please check back regularly for updates and new information.
Ugh. Yep. No RSS feed. Look, I know I’m nay-saying again, and that it’s really boring. But no RSS feed these days is just not on. I hope they’ll fix that soon because this will be an important resource, and I want to keep up to date without having to check back regularly.
Nibbles: Collecting, US heirlooms, Sequencing NUS, Nutrition strategies, Potatoes and climate change, Italian genetics
- NSF re-invents the genebank wheel. No, that’s unfair, they’ve given much-needed money to evolutionary scientists to go out and collect seeds of 34 species in a really pernickety way.
- Heirlooms being lost (maybe) and being re-found in the US. Thanks to Eve (on FB) for both.
- A Cape tomato by any other name…
- Gates Foundation has a new nutrition strategy. Gotta admire the chutzpah of summarizing the thing in basically half a side of A4. Compare and contrast, both as to content and presentation, with the CGIAR. Unfair again, I know, but that’s the kind of mood I’m in. Jess unavailable for comment.
- Very complicated, very pretty maps about potatoes and climate change.
- “I failed to notice substantial contributions to discussions or presentations from breeders or seed organizations, the end users of so much of the research discussed.” Pat Heslop Harrison calls ’em like he seems ’em.
Getting genebanks right
There are 5,000 varieties of potatoes in the gene bank in Chile. Wotske, this year, is growing 17.
Wotske is Rosemary Wotske, owner of Poplar Bluff Farm near Strathmore in Canada, and more power to her. But what about this large potato genebank in Chile? That sounds interesting.
Too interesting, it turns out. Because of course there isn’t one, as anyone who has spent even five minutes looking into potato genebanks can ascertain. Or rather, there is a potato genebank in Chile but it’s got about 700 accessions and not 5,000 — or it did the last time the data in WIEWS were updated. And there is a much larger, international genebank not too far away, at the International Potato Center (CIP), but it’s got about 4,300 potato landraces, and Peru isn’t Chile is it?