- Educational materials for conservation.
- Seminar on agroecology next week by Professor of Agroecology Steve Gliessman.
- Why is there a citron in Van Eyck’s Ghent altarpiece?
- APPS Special Issue Call for Papers: “Meeting the Challenge of Exceptional Plant Conservation: Technologies and Approaches.”
More online genebank training
…MSBP’s popular Seed Conservation Techniques (SCT) training course will be running from the 11th to the 22nd of October 2021. Following the Partnership’s agreed Seed Conservation Standards, the course provides trainees with the knowledge needed to collect, conserve and manage high quality ex situ collections of wild plant seeds. Topics covered will include: planning a seed collection programme, assessing and collecting techniques, post-harvest handling, measuring seed moisture content, seed processing and quality assessment, and seed germination and dormancy. After a successful first online version was piloted last year, we will again offer a fully online 2-week training course with content provided online as a mixture of live sessions, pre-recorded training modules and practical exercises.
More info on the Kew website.
Yes we have banana catalogues
Great to hear that recent banana diversity collecting in my old stamping ground of the Pacific 1 has resulted in three beautiful germplasm catalogues:
- Rarotonga and Aitutaki, Cook Islands
- Upolu, Samoa
- West New Britain, Papua New Guinea
In due course, this material will end up in the Musa International Transit Centre and will be available for breeding, research and training under the SMTA of the Plant Treaty.
Nibbles: Plant book, Heirlooms, Vavilov, Breeding
- Amazing plant stories from Jon Drori.
- An amazing crop diversity stat from DW.
- Amazing botanist story.
- Kind of amazing this got published.
A taste of coffee to come
Seems like it’s probably worth recapping the whole new-species-will-save-your-morning-coffee-from-climate-change story that’s been going around.
It all started last year with a paper describing the rediscovery in the wilds of Sierra Leone of a species of coffee that used to be very well liked but then fell out of commercial favour due to low yields. It’s called Coffea stenophylla 2 and of course Jeremy did a podcast about it, interviewing one of the authors of said paper, the very engaging Prof. Jeremy Haggar.
Fast forward a year and we now have a follow-up paper assessing the taste of coffee made from beans of C. stenophylla from that (very tiny, alas) wild population in Sierra Leone and also from a (more substantial) CIRAD research stand in La Reunion. And guess what? It’s really good. So of course Jeremy went back to Prof. Haggar for another nice chat.
C. stenophylla grows in hot and humid lowlands, so it’s a little more ready for climate change than your average arabica. 3 Still, the yield issue is presumably still there, and no doubt other problems will arise, as they always do. But I’m keeping my fingers crossed, because I really want to taste the stuff — and boost Sierra Leonean business along the way.
Oh and of course we’ll have to revise the global coffee diversity conservation strategy now…