- FARA-led Conference on Agricultural Biodiversity in Africa, 2010
- Switzerland will not cut support to genebank in Africa.
- Yesterday’s birthday paean to Norman Borlaug,
- Man worries (inchoately) about banana extinction.
- “Over 20,000 indigenous varieties of Indian rice and other food grains have been conserved under Crop Germplasm Conservation at the gene banks.”
- IITA gets USAID support to come up with better cassava recipes. Luigi comments: “All the money in the world will not be enough.”
- Giving native bees a home.
- Bespoke organic beer in the UK. Sweet!
Nibbles: Adaptation, Vegetables, Wood, Allotment, Earthworms, Salmon, Bees, Malaria, Potatoes, Apples
- ICRISAT: “The impact of climate change on the yields under low input agriculture is likely to be minimal as other factors will continue to provide the overriding constraints to crop growth and yield.” So that’s all right then.
- Book and CD-ROM on African indigenous veggies.
- CD-ROM of wood characteristics.
- The agrobiodiversity of “…the oldest and largest area of detached town gardens in Britain” being surveyed. Cultivated since 1605. Wow.
- Earthworm Week! Yay!
- “This is an exciting time for salmon conservation in the Pahsimeroi.”
- Hawaiian native bees in trouble. Get in line.
- The world has a malaria map. Very cool.
- The Canary Islands tries to save its potatoes, sweet and otherwise.
- The Forgotten Fruits Summit. You heard me.
Revising the US Plant Hardiness Zone Map
“All gardeners are in zone denial.”
The zones in question are the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Plant Hardiness Zones, which show where different garden species are supposed to do well. Gardeners, of course, think they know better, and will always try to push that envelope.
Anyway, the current version of the Plant Hardiness Zone Map was done way back in 1990, and needed updating. So there’s a new one coming soon. It’s bound to be different, in places very different. A whole new set of recommendations for gardeners to go into denial about.
USDA is not describing what the new map will show, but outside experts say that the trend is for zones to shift northward. “Some places have definitely warmed, although others haven’t changed at all,” says Tony Avent, owner of North Carolina-based Plant Delights Nursery and an advisor for the revision.
You can’t do much with the current map online, but the next version will be downloadable to your GIS. It will also be more sophisticated, with better data, better interpolation and better resolution (800m):
The revised map draws on 30 years of data and uses a complex algorithm to factor in other variables that affect local temperatures, such as altitude and the presence of water bodies.
Will some of the USDA’s clonal repositories (field genebanks) find themselves in the wrong zone?
Iron-tolerant rice
SciDev.net reports on a fascinating trial set to begin in May. Researchers in West Africa have selected about 80 different rice varieties from genebanks around the world. These will be planted in iron-rich soils in four countries: Burkina Faso, Ghana, Guinea and Nigeria to see how they survive. Iron at the levels found in the trial plots would normally kill high-yielding rice varieties. The researchers will be looking for the five best varieties in each plot, and will be assisted in their search by local farmers who have agreed to participate in the variety selection. The best-performing varieties will then be given to the farmers to grow using their normal methods, to see whether they outperform traditional varieties.
An interesting aspect of the trial seems to be that the researchers are not looking for high-iron rice, which might help to address chronic anaemia. They want varieties that will yield well on high-iron soils, even if the rice itself remains iron poor. Increasing the mineral content (notably iron and zinc) of cereal crops remains an important breeding goal, complicated by the arcane relationships between soil levels, genotype, other soil chemistry and, probably, phases of the moon. There is impressive variation among accessions of wheat wild relatives and several methods have already been tried to make high-iron rice, which does actually reduce anemia. There are also traditional rice varieties that are high in iron.
A reply to Dr Tatiana
From The Guardian‘s science columnist:
…the massive Svalbard Global Seed Vault, built inside a mountain on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, opened its doors last year. Yet there may be little point to such a project if seeds, in general, last only a few years.
If.