- Natural history collections important in monitoring biodiversity and engaging public interest. Well I never.
Nibbles: Chile breeding, Sugarcane in India, Seed Vault, Cuban breeding, Cattle in Argentina, Flax fibres, Fisheries, Urban mushrooms, Ferula, African leafy green
- “All green chile derives its genetic base from the work of Fabian Garcia. We are at the center of the universe when it comes to chile because of Dr. Garcia.”
- Indian farmers move out of sugarcane, live to regret it.
- Freakonomists get Svalbard governance slightly wrong, but what the heck. Get it from the horse’s mouth.
- Adapting to climate change in Cuba through crop improvement.
- The Argentinian gauchos are running scared. And not just because of their pathetic football team.
- Microscopic remains of 30,000 year old flax cords found in Georgian cave. 30,000?
- Gotta fish less, boffins say.
- Growing shittake in a disused Mittagong railway tunnel.
- You remember our recent Dung of the Devil post? You remember how you thought it was a plant you didn’t need to know much about? Think again.
- BBC’s The Food Programme tackles African indigenous veggies.
Vegetable landraces of England and Wales
While lawyers and some scientists jump through hoops in their efforts to define — or at least describe — what they mean by “landrace” the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) in Britain has quietly published the results of a project entitled “Vegetable landrace inventory of England and Wales”. ((Heads should roll for the typo in the first sentence on the UK Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture portal. But they won’t.)) We haven’t had time to even skim the full report, but judging by the Information Bulletin that accompanied it, this is a very important piece of work. The Bulletin, which is extremely readable, explains clearly the importance of landraces and why they are under threat. It outlines the sources of information, from commercial seed companies that still maintain varieties on the UK Vegetable ‘B’ List (which is also explained) through to NGOs, smaller seed companies, and individual farmers. It offers a snapshot of the landraces that have been preserved, and even valiantly attempts to answer the question “What is a landrace?”. As for another question — How many English and Welsh vegetable landraces are there? — I can do no better than to quote from the Bulletin:
The answer to this question is we currently dont know and may never be able to give a precise estimate, partly because some varieties are marketed or grown under different common names, but also because gaining access to information about who is growing landraces is hampered by a number of challenges as highlighted earlier. However, if we are to retain this national resource we need to continue to build the inventory and gradually increase our knowledge of the diversity that exists before it is lost forever.
If ever there was a universally applicable set of ideas, this is it, and it deserves to be taken up widely around the world. The Defra project has shown that it is possible to gain an accurate understanding without spurious precision, and should be a model for any organization interested in gathering information and materials. You insist you want numbers?
Four UK seedbanks are primarily responsible for the maintenance of English and Welsh vegetable landrace diversity — the Heritage Seed Library (HSL), the John Innes Centre (JIC — notable for pea and bean collections), Science and Advice for Scottish Agriculture (SASA) and Warwick HRI’s Vegetable Genebank (WHRI). Collectively, they are responsible for the maintenance of seed samples of at least 327 vegetable landraces; however, we know that the actual number is higher because at present not all landrace samples are distinguished as landraces in their database maagement systems. Work is currently in progress to ensure that all landace material is identified.
Again, that should be resonating loudly around the world.
The project examined the identity of varieties on the B list (essentially traditional varieties that were in place before the EU Common Catalogue and its registered varieties came along) and discovered that the greatest number of varieties is among the brassicas, which account for 91 of the 345 landraces listed on the B list. No great surprise there, given that outbreeding Brassica oleracea makes it possibly the easiest species in which to find some slightly different characteristics (although that also makes it one of the hardest in which to maintain all the characteristics of a variety).
One of the interesting trends that the project identified is that government genebanks are increasingly taking on the work of maintaining traditional varieties landraces when, for one reason or another, their maintainers lose interest. SASA is currently responsible for 42% of the landraces. That represents a sea-change from when I was personally directly involved with this kind of thing. Are they making the seeds available, though, to gardeners and others less interested in breeding than in simply growing the varieties? They do offer a back-up scheme, which will replace a landrace should a grower lose it for some reason, an effort that the study says should be extended to England and Wales. The report also mentions Seedy Sunday and Seedling Saturday as community-organised events to promote the exchange of diversity and the knowledge to use it, and praises grower and breeder days organized by the four main genebanks.
One thing I’d suggest to expand the range of landraces of England and Wales would be to go looking in other government and NGO genebanks, especially in ex-colonies. Emigrants invariably took their seeds with them. Some that may no longer be available in the old country have surely survived in the new and could be repatriated to the delight of all.
A final quote:
[W]hile the loss of old varieties and the irreplaceable diversity that has gone with them is of concern, we may now be in a new period of expansion of locally-based vegetable crop diversity as a result of a strong resurgence of interest in growing traditional varieties and in grower-based breeding amongst both amateur and professional growers — the formal sector needs to work with the maintainers to put in place strategies to capture this diversity, as well as nurturing the culture that is responsible for creating and maintaining it.
All in all, this is very heartening news about the state of vegetable landraces in England and Wales. But is it a bit too heartening? We’d love to hear from people there who have on-the-ground experience.
Adapting in the Pacific
The New Agriculturist is out, and, among many other things, it features an interview with my old boss at the Secretariat of the Pacific Community (SPC), Aleki Sisifa. Aleki has some very sensible things to say about adapting to climate change. Here’s an example, but read the whole thing.
We need to help farmers stay ahead of climate change, and genetic resources are going to be crucial for that. At SPC we hold the genetic resources for the Pacific region, and as part of our climate change work we are collecting varieties that can withstand conditions such as drought, salinity and water-logging.
We are working to ensure fair use and ready access of these resources and, in June 2009, our collection was placed in the Multilateral System of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture. Around the same time, agreement was made with the Global Crop Diversity Trust to safeguard our collection of taro and yam, two of our most important food crops in this region.
How would you PageRank genebank accessions?
Various friends have sent me, over the past few days, different takes on a recent paper which used the Google PageRank algorithm to identify the most “important” species in food webs, perhaps because they know I’m a sucker for examples of cross-pollination between disciplines. The BBC had its say, and also ScienceDaily, among others. I posted the ScienceDaily article on Facebook, as I am wont to do when I think something is interesting — maybe even have a gut feeling it might be relevant to agrobiodiversity conservation — but don’t know quite what to make of it. Sure enough, someone left a comment that he thought the algorithm was a secret, which was also my understanding: Google don’t want people to manipulate the rank of their web pages. But then someone else came in and said that the basics of how the thing works are in the public domain.
To prove it, he provided a link to an American Mathematical Society article entitled How Google Finds Your Needle in the Web’s Haystack. Which is why I love social networking, but that’s another story. Now, that article is definitely NSFW, unless you work at the American Mathematical Society, so think twice before clicking, but here’s the lede:
Imagine a library containing 25 billion documents but with no centralized organization and no librarians. In addition, anyone may add a document at any time without telling anyone. You may feel sure that one of the documents contained in the collection has a piece of information that is vitally important to you, and, being impatient like most of us, you’d like to find it in a matter of seconds. How would you go about doing it?
And I thought to myself: just change that 25 billion, which of course refers to the number of pages on the internet, to 6.5 million or 7.2 million or whatever, and the guy could just as easily be talking about accessions in the world’s genebanks.
Now, basically we search for the germplasm we need by starting with a big dataset and applying filters: wheat, awnless wheat, awnless wheat with such and such resistance, awnless wheat with such and such resistance from areas with less than x mm of rainfall per annum, and so on. Would it make any sense to rank the accessions in that initial big dataset? On what basis would one do that anyway? That is, what is the equivalent of hyperlinks for accessions? Because the essence of PageRank is that important pages receive lots of hyperlinks from important pages. So, numbers of requests? Amount of data available on the accession? But wouldn’t that just mean that only the usual suspects would get picked all the time? Genetic uniqueness, perhaps, then? That would be turning the algorithm on its head. Looking for lack of connections rather than connections to other accessions. You could in fact have different ranking criteria for different purposes, I suppose.
Ok, now my brain hurts. This cross-pollination stuff can be fun, but it is hard work.