- “Readers, florists, Egyptians, can you help?” Maybe some of them are crops.
- Seeds move from South to North for safety. Australia backs up to Norway.
- Tired of your hair shirt? Try pineapple fibre.
- The history of alcohol in China; Happy Rabbit.
- How to save heirloom seeds (for people near Central Arkansas).
- Food and War (not what you think; a book review)
Latest on the Egyptian Deserts Gene Bank
We’ve heard more from El-Sayed Mohamed El-Azazi, who’s doing a PhD at the Desert Research Centre on seed conservation of Acacia spp. (“Ecophysiological studies for some Acacia species grown in Egyptian Deserts and its conservation in gene bank” is the title). You’ll remember that the place was looted a few days ago, and people are justifiably worried about the Egyptian Deserts Gene Bank housed by the institute.
El-Sayed is adamant that the seeds and field genebank are safe. However, it is clear that the laboratories have been thoroughly trashed, and a lot of equipment broken or taken.
Along with the computers went a lot of data. El-Sayed says he has lost some of his PhD data. And the genebank’s database seems to be gone, although the passport data is still around in hardcopy. There are about 1100 accessions in the genebank, of about 750 wild plant species.
Which brings up a point that’s maybe not often addressed. And that is that the desirability of safety duplication goes as much for the data about germplasm accessions as for the seeds themselves.
A Svalbard for data, anyone?
Nibbles: Apples, Agave, Argentina, Araucanas, Egypt, Agro Pastorale, Add-on benefits, Oil Palm
- Dave’s Garden does the apple forests of Almaty.
- Agave nectar sweetens the prospects of Otomi women in Mexico.
- Rhizowen investigates silverweed while taxonomists slug it out: Potentilla anserina or Argentina anserina?
- Just what the urban poultryperson needs: a hotel for chickens.
- National Gene Bank of Egypt website untouched.
- A diplomat visit’s Cameroon’s Cornice Agro Pastorale, and is impressed.
- Tackling climate change benefits health … and vice versa.
- Almost certainly more than you needed to know about Palm Oil palm.
Gaps in cassava collection in Africa highlighted
A request from MapSpaM for people to help them in mapping the distribution of cassava cultivation in Africa ((You may remember us mentioning MapSpaM before as part of an ongoing discussion of crop distribution data.)) forced me into some more playing with Google Earth. I just took MapSpaM’s draft cassava map…
…and plonked on top of it the germplasm provenance data from Genesys. Here’s the result (right click to save the kmz file):
Which highlights — not for the first time, but very powerfully — the lack of material from eastern and southern Africa in the international genebanks. It is definitely important to think about safety duplicating national collections from those countries.
Here’s a close-up for West Africa:
Pretty good representation overall, but even here there are some definite gaps. Time to get collecting again in Africa too. Though of course a geographic gap is not necessarily a genetic gap…
More lessons from Egypt
For no other reason than that I like playing with Google Earth, here’s a map of Egyptian germplasm in the Millennium Seed Bank (red dots), which are duplicates of some of the material at the recently looted Deserts Gene Bank, and in Genesys (which covers the CG Centre genebanks contributing to SINGER, the European genebanks contributing to EURISCO, and the genebanks of the USDA system). The red markers are wild material, the green cultivated.
Now, do you see that row of green markers in the middle of the desert in the south of the country?
Those turn out to be various vegetables from three different genebanks in the USA and Europe. Which nicely illustrates the usefulness of bringing datasets together. And playing with Google Earth.