- Picture guide to West African plants. Includes agrobiodiversity!
- Iowa State Agronomy podcasts. Some cool stuff. Check out the one on “Modeling Seed Germination Over Time to Decide When to Regenerate Seed Lots in Long-term Storage.”
- A “formal global program to develop subnational agricultural land-use statistics“? Riiiiight.
- GFAR meeting on sustainable use of agrobiodiversity says “[w]e need to initiate solid and inclusive actions to build concerted and practical actions on sustainable use.” Well they do say actions speak louder than words.
- Researcher “trying to remove the perception that hackneys are ‘half-crazed.'” I’d rather pay to save them if they were crazy, but that’s me.
- Romaine: germplasm to breeding lines. But to cultivars? Private sector to pick up the slack.
- Crops not mentioned among species that save our lives.
- Saving sacred groves in Ethiopia. By building pit latrines. Well why not?
- Brazil nut spread by people.
- A trade-off between species and genetic diversity? Say it
ain’t so! - Today’s iconic species threatened by climate change is the baobab.
- An Egyptian archaeobotanical blog.
- Botanic gardens can threaten biodiversity.
- Nature has (or had, it’s a couple months old) a supplement on nutrigenomics.
Agrobiodiversity and languages in danger
I’ve finally been able to obtain the dataset on which UNESCO’s interactive Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger is based. 1 In the map below, which you’ll be able to see bigger if you click on it, you can see Chad’s endangered languages (brighter red means more endangered), mashed up with germplasm from Chad listed in Genesys.
Would it be sensible to give particular priority for germplasm collecting to areas where languages are threatened with extinction?
Gaps in cassava collection in Africa highlighted
A request from MapSpaM for people to help them in mapping the distribution of cassava cultivation in Africa 2 forced me into some more playing with Google Earth. I just took MapSpaM’s draft cassava map…
…and plonked on top of it the germplasm provenance data from Genesys. Here’s the result (right click to save the kmz file):
Which highlights — not for the first time, but very powerfully — the lack of material from eastern and southern Africa in the international genebanks. It is definitely important to think about safety duplicating national collections from those countries.
Here’s a close-up for West Africa:
Pretty good representation overall, but even here there are some definite gaps. Time to get collecting again in Africa too. Though of course a geographic gap is not necessarily a genetic gap…
Uncontacted agrobiodiversity
Survival International has a new website on Uncontacted Tribes:
More than 100 tribes around the world reject contact with outsiders. This is their story.
Somewhat weirdly, the website includes a map, although it is pointed out that it “won’t help anyone make ‘first contact.’ But it will help to stop oil companies and loggers from invading the lands of uncontacted tribes.”
Be that as it may, I could not resist mashing it up in Google Earth 3 with the data in Genesys on the world’s holdings of agrobiodiversity. This is the result for an area comprising the Brazilian state of Rondonia and some surrounding regions.
Not surprisingly, there’s not much in the way of germplasm accessions from the general areas occupied by uncontacted tribes. Oil and logging companies may not be the only things that these tribes should be worried about.
Nibbles: IK, Fragaria, Citrus, Millet breeding, Vitis, Agricultural biodiversity, Satellite imagery, Subsistence
- Indigenous knowledge of agrobiodiversity makes the news in Indonesia.
- Reconstructing the strawberry.
- And reconstructing the history of cultivated citrus fruits.
- ICRISAT millet breeders get an a new toy.
- Plenty of diversity in the cultivated grape still. And it’s going to need it.
- Biodiversity (and agrobiodiversity?) needed for farm productivity. Well I never! But more mixed results available too. What’s a poor boy to think?
- SPOT 5 imagery can be used to identify crops. In Texas. But in Tanzania?
- Agricultural biodiversity and subsistence traditions, Part 2. In the Ozarks. But in Omo? (And here’s Part 1.)