- Indian academics voice some reservations about CBD ABS regime. Maybe a multilateral approach would be better?
- CIAT warns about climate change effect on crops. Kenyan farmers know all about that. And Koreans too. Oh, and speaking of kimchi…
- Beer proteome means better beer. Fundamental research indeed.
- Cattle breeds are real. And the gaur?
- Nepal inaugurates genebank.
- San benefit from bioprospecting license for medicinal plant.
- Ahmed Djoghlaf says…
- Weeds? Not weeds. Cities as biodiversity hotspots? Oh I give up.
- Orange cassava due to one amino acid.
Climate change winners and losers in Europe: the story so far
A recent paper in Agricultural Systems looks at what’s happened to the potential yields of eight crops (winter wheat, spring barley, maize, winter rapeseed, potato, sugar beet, pulses and sunflower) in Europe from 1976 to 2005. Italy and central and eastern Europe have been the big losers (left), probably due to higher temperature increases, sometimes in combination with lower radiation values.
And the British Islands have been the big winners (right), due to to longer period during which temperature is optimum for CO2 assimilation, sometimes in combination with higher radiation levels. That, of course, cannot last forever, though.
Nibbles:Collecting missions, Grapes, Beans, Genome, Local markets, Water
- From GBDBH, a light glimmers: browse and search records of crop collecting missions.
- “Variations in early-season temperatures may alter substantially grapevine yield formation.” For Cab Sauv at any rate.
- Mixture of beans as good as resistant variety against anthracnose disease.
- Genome inversion spurs ecotypic differentiation.
- A review of medicinal plant markets.
- Today’s huge global dataset: “threats to human water security and freshwater biodiversity in global river systems.”
The geography of black rice
Sometimes it pays to spend some time in Genebank Database Hell, if you can fight through the pain.
You may remember a piece recently about the antioxidant properties of black rice. But where does black rice come from? Well, hanging around with the Genesys and GRIN-Global crowd in the past couple of days has allowed me to come up with this map in answer to that deceptively simple question.
In yellow are all the rice accessions from Asia which have coordinates, as recorded in the IRRI database, EURISCO and GRIN. In red are the black rice accessions.
You’d have thought such a map would be pretty easy to make. But you’d be wrong. I had to get an Excel spreadsheet from IRRI with the characterization data, ((For which many thanks!)) and mash it up with the passport data in Genesys for the same accessions, and then export two separate kmz files and fiddle around in Google Earth. ((Thanks to Google for the Pro license!)) Well, they don’t call it Genebank Database Hell for nothing. But it is getting better, slowly but surely.
Spatial datasets continue to proliferate, and evolve
A few more huge spatial datasets for you this morning, as I deal with jet-lag in a Maryland hotel room at 4 am.
Today there’s a high resolution dataset of the population of Africa. And an analysis of wetland protected areas. ((See in particular the map at the end of the paper superimposing Ramsar sites on the Vavilov Centres of Origin.)) And finally a global dataset of particulate matter pollution. This is presented from a human health perspective, but it could have applications in agriculture too. 
I still want to know who’s keeping track of this stuff. Maybe you don’t need to, you can just google as the need arises, but somehow I doubt it. Would love to hear from the CGIAR’s spatial data consortium folks, if they’re listening.
Meanwhile, one of the participants in that consortium has announced that they’re updating one of their iconic products, the now oldish “Atlas of the Common Bean (Phaseolus vulgaris) in Africa.” 
How long before they mash it up with that population dataset? And with the data on the location of genebank accessions, for example from Genesys.
Not that it hasn’t been done before, in a very crude way, as you can see in the map in Figure 2 below.