- 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.
Documentary on rice and climate change goes online
It’s a bit apocalyptic in tone, but it’s always good to see a genebank featured (starting at about 7:00 minutes in) in a popular documentary, in this case IRRI’s. But there’s much more, so watch the whole thing. Well done, Ruaraidh. And thanks, History Channel.
Nibbles: CBNRM, Extension, Seed systems, Climate change book and conferences, Cassava, Endophytes, Old Irish Goats, Plant Cuttings, Ethnobotany, Weeds
- Designing the next generation of community-based natural resource management projects. No agriculture. Weird. Well, not so much actually.
- Extension systems have a website! Yeah but do they need one?
- Informal seed system working just fine in Indian Himalayas. So maybe the extension system is not needed? But, hey, they have a website, did I mention that?
- Climate Change and Crop Production: The Book. And: The Conference. No but wait, here’s another.
- The unusual crop that is cassava.Yeah, but in The Economist?
- ” …among the largest collections of endophytes…” Not a lot of people know that.
- Old Irish goats (and others, to be fair) meet to talk about, well, Old Irish goats.
- The great Plant Cuttings.
- How to design an ethnobotanical garden. Would coca find a place?
- Musings on the evolution of weeds.