GIS – Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

March 22, 2023

Dams, damn dams, and accessions

Every once in a while a new dam dataset crops up. Dam, not damn. Well, maybe damn as well. Anyway, when that happens, I feel compelled to mash it up with accession locality data. Because if I don’t do it, who will?

The new dataset is the Global Dam Tracker, and you can download it and everything of course. It’s pretty easy to then upload it to Google Earth and play around with it. Including combining it with data on wild Oryza accessions from Genesys, for example.

On this map, the dams are shown in blue and wild rice accessions in red.

You can zoom in if you’re worried about the long-term in situ future of any given population.

Not for the first time, I wonder about the feasibility of one day automatically and in real time combining data from multiple such potential stressors to predict the risk of genetic erosion around the world. Something that AI should be able to do, surely?

January 17, 2023January 17, 2023

Nibbles: CIAT, AGG, Volcani, Restoration, Food diversity, Deforestation, Berries, Diverse systems

I’ve been told I need to be more explicit in my Nibbling. So here’s a CCTV video on the Future Seeds genebank in Colombia. You know the one.
The Australian Grains Genebank (AGG) in Horsham is announcing a new online seed catalogue. The genebank is also on Genesys.
According to this article, the Israel Plant Gene Bank of the Volcani Center Agricultural Research Organization near Tel Aviv has some pretty cool wheats. I wonder if any of them are also in the AGG. The Volcani genebank is not on Genesys, alas. But some of its material is.
The Director of Science of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and others say that we need lots more genebanks if we are to do all the ecosystem restoration that needs to be done around the world.
Short & sweet blog post on the importance of food diversity from the policy officer at the Soil Association. Genebanks not mentioned though, alas.
Vox has an article on a new European law aimed at preventing the sale of some agricultural commodities grown on recently cleared forest land. I guess the next step would be restoring those ecosystems. If only there were more genebanks…
Some hero mapped the distribution of all the berries of North America, and made cool videos of the results.
Report from Wageningen AU on “The need to enhance crop, livestock andaquatic genetic diversity in food systems.” Lots and lots on genebanks.
So, what did you think? Do you prefer telegraphic, impressionistic Nibbles, or these lengthier, more explicit versions? Let me know in the comments.

January 10, 2023January 11, 2023

Liberating seeds — and climate matching tools

I hit “publish” too soon yesterday. If I had waited a couple of hours, I could have done a deeper dive into how Jeremy spent his holidays, by adding his just-dropped podcast on the “Let’s Liberate Diversity” Forum held in Budapest back in October to his last newsletter of 2022.

In the podcast, Jeremy muses on the new EU Organic Regulation (Regulation (EU) 2018/848), which finally allows the marketing of organic heterogeneous material (OHM), and interviews two beneficiaries of this welcome change in the law. Spoiler alert: Belgian beer is being re-Belgianized, and everybody seems very happy about it.

Incidentally, if you’re interested in doing the kind of climate matching Jeremy mentions in his third note, you could check out this website, though it only covers Europe. If you want global coverage, you might have to brush up on your R.1

Thanks, Julian. [↩]

December 1, 2022

Nibbles: Fancy fungus, Fancy CWR book, Fancy dataset, Fancy food, Fancy wheat collection, Fancy diet, Fancy seeds, Fancy agriculture

Symbiotic fungus can help plants and detoxify methylmercury.
Very attractive book on the wild tomatoes of Peru. I wonder if any of them eat heavy metals.
There’s a new dataset on the world’s terrestrial ecosystems. I’d like to know which one has the most crop wild relative species per unit area. Has anyone done that calculation? They must have.
Iran sets up a saffron genebank. Could have sworn they already had one.
The Natural History Museum digs up some old wheat samples, the BBC goes a bit crazy with it.
Paleolithic diets included plants. Maybe not wheat or saffron though.
Community seedbanks are all the rage in Odisha.
Seeds bring UK and South Africa closer together. Seeds in seedbanks. Not community seedbanks, perhaps, but one can hope.
Can any of the above make agriculture any more nutrition-sensitive? I’d like to think yes. Maybe except for the mercury-eating fungus, though you never know…

November 14, 2022November 14, 2022

Brainfood: Coconut in vitro, Clean cryo, Chickpea & lentil collections, Genebank data history, Eurisco update, Mining genebank data, TIK, Sampling strategy, Drones, GIS, Mexican CWR, Post-2020 biodiversity framework

Thiamine improves in vitro propagation of sweetpotato [Ipomoea batatas (L.) Lam.] – confirmed with a wide range of genotypes. Getting there, keep tweaking…
Minimizing the deleterious effects of endophytes in plant shoot tip cryopreservation. Something else to tweak.
Ex Situ Conservation of Plant Genetic Resources: An Overview of Chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) and Lentil (Lens culinaris Medik.) Worldwide Collections. Thankfully not much in vitro and cryo involved. The main tweak necessary is to share more characterization data with breeders.
Data, Duplication, and Decentralisation: Gene Bank Management in the 1980s and 1990s. Ah, but do calls for more data also reflect attempts to cut costs and build political bridges? And would that be so bad?
EURISCO update 2023: the European Search Catalogue for Plant Genetic Resources, a pillar for documentation of genebank material. Arguably, Eurisco tries to do all of the above, and pretty well.
Bioinformatic Extraction of Functional Genetic Diversity from Heterogeneous Germplasm Collections for Crop Improvement. You need fancy maths to make sense of all that data. And use it.
Research Status and Trends of Agrobiodiversity and Traditional Knowledge Based on Bibliometric Analysis (1992–Mid-2022). Not much traditional knowledge in those databases, though, eh? That would be one hell of a tweak.
Species-tailored sampling guidelines remain an efficient method to conserve genetic diversity ex situ: A study on threatened oaks. Meanwhile, some people are still trying to figure out the best way to tweak sampling strategies to add diversity to genebanks. Spoiler alert: you need data on individual species.
Collecting critically endangered cliff plants using a drone-based sampling manipulator. You also need drones.
Application of Geographical Information System for PGR Management. One thing you can do with all that data is map stuff. So at least the drones know where to go.
Incorporating evolutionary and threat processes into crop wild relatives conservation. The only thing that’s missing from this is traditional knowledge. And maybe drones.
Conserving species’ evolutionary potential and history: opportunities under the new post-2020 global biodiversity framework. All these data will allow us to measure how well we’re doing. And whether we can ask for cryotanks, drones, and better databases.