- More on the inauguration of the new Nepal genebank.
- Someone else thinks crop production maps might be useful in prioritizing germplasm collecting. No, wait…
- Diverse diets are good for you. Well I never. No, it’s always good to have the data.
- Andy Jarvis feeds reptiles climate change facts shock.
Live tweeting The Big Nature Debate
Well that was fun. Along with a few others, I live tweeted The Big Nature Debate which took place at the Natural History Museum in London on the afternoon of 7 October. You can get a flavour by checking the naturedb8 hashtag, ((How long does Twitter keep tweets?)) but I wasn’t very consistent in using it, and neither were the others, so you might need to hunt around for more, untagged tweets. Best point made? Well, apart from the one about weevils being important too (as pollinators of oil palm, among other things), that biodiversity conservation needs to talk to agriculture. I think that came from Professor Jon Hutton, Director of the United Nations Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre. And vice versa. As pointed out using crop wild relatives as an example by Paul Smith, Director of the Millennium Seed Bank, Kew Royal Botanic Gardens.
Nibbles: Musa wild relative, Soil biodiversity, Wild sorghum hybrids, Millet diversity, Bees, Garlic core collection, Heirloom seed saving, Nutrition, Fungal conservation, Sacred places
- New(ish) banana wild relative found in Mekong. Photo by Markku Hakkinen.
- Conserving soil biodiversity.
- Ecological fitness of wild-cultivated sorghum hybrids equal to wild parent.
- Pattern of genetic diversity in pearl millet determined by artificial, not natural, selection.
- The latest on the troubles of bees.
- Garlic gets cored. Totally SFW.
- Seed saving in the Hudson Valley.
- West African leaders say agriculture should be about nutrition. As opposed to?
- International Society for Fungal Conservation established. And that’s about it for now, but there are some ideas about what it will do.
A threatened genebanks roundup
It’s clear genebanks around the world are having a hard time. The poster child just at the moment is Pavlovsk, of course. But we’ve heard lately that Australia’s genebanks are also threatened. And we’ve also been following a similar situation over the past several months at Wellesbourne in the UK. Why is this happening? As chance would have it, I think a couple of recent posts here may hold some clues.
I think, for example, that our failure in the genetic resources conservation community to quantify — or at least communicate — costs properly is not, er, helping. And we still have a long way to go in facilitating the process of getting conserved material where it is most needed. So, maybe we’ve also seen in the past few days the answer to genebank funding. But that doesn’t mean we can ease up on getting our costs straight, and getting our material known and out there, which among other things means sorting out Genebank Database Hell.
Well, there’s another thing. We do also need to admit to ourselves that maybe, just maybe, not all genebanks are necessary. I hope Pavlovsk, the Australian genebanks and Wellesbourne survive and thrive. It will set a bad precedent if they go under, a very bad precedent, and in any case a genebank is more than just brick, mortar and seeds. It’s people and expertise, and we should fight for them. But if it’s not to be, I hope at least the unique material they have been conserving so diligently for so long makes its way speedily and safely to some other home, where its long-term conservation and availability will perhaps be better ensured.
Australia and Russian Federation shoulder to shoulder over genebanks
We pointed out recently that the threat to the Pavlovsk Experiment Station’s field genebanks is not, in fact, as unique as it might seem. From Science magazine comes news that “Australia’s seed banks are tumbling like dominoes”. The report details the gradual loss of Australia’s six genebanks.
[I]n mid-2008 a bank in Adelaide holding Mediterranean forages such as alfalfa closed its doors; of its 45,000 accessions, 95% are held nowhere else in the world.
Where have we heard claims like that before?
Part of the article that I don’t understand concerns Australia’s obligations under the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture. Is there really a mechanism to prevent free-riders, as the article suggests? If Australia cannot supply seeds from its own genebanks, because those seeds are dead, or no longer exist, will they really be blocked access to other genebanks’ accessions?
The article ends by echoing what is really the crucial point for all genebanks:
Seed banks “need long-term support that is outside grant or research support,” says Megan Clarke, chief executive of CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency and the country’s main supporter of agricultural research.
That is clearly as true in Australia as it is in Russia. And the Australians aren’t even planning to build houses where the genebanks were.