Category: GIS

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Crop wild relatives mashed up with deforestation

The recent PNAS paper on deforestation has been getting a lot of attention. The data are available, and our mole at CIAT (thanks, Julian!) kindly mashed them up with the distribution of a selection of crop wild relatives (Cajanus, Cicer, Eleusine, Hordeum, Lens, Pennisetum, Phaseolus, Sorghum, Triticum, Aegilops, Vicia, Vigna, and Zea). Here’s the result. In red are shown area where forest loss is >10%. Green shows areas where >15 species in the above genera are expected to be found from niche models. You’ll have to click on it to see it properly.

Perhaps not surprisingly given the genepools involved, there’s not much overlap between crop wild relative richness and deforestation. These particular species don’t seem to have much to fear from the loss of forested land. Except for a few small areas in southern Africa, that is.

The picture would clearly be somewhat different if Julian had included wild cassava, rubber, apples or mangoes. I’m sure he will very soon.

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Nibbles: Heirloom store, Leaf miners, Mongolian drought, GPS, Coca, Ag origins, Aquaculture, Lice, Bud break in US, IFAD livestock, biofuels, Pig history

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An early look at an atlas of agrobiodiversity

On reading about the Atlas of Global Conservation here a few days ago, Nora Castaneda of Bioversity International’s Regional Office for the Americas sent me some of her own forays in that area, which are focused on plant species of agricultural interest. They’re still works in progress, and unpublished, ((Which is why I’m only putting up pretty low resolution images.)) but definitely worth having a quick look at. The data comes from germplasm databases (SINGER, GRIN, EURISCO) and the databases put together for the GapAnalysis project, about which we have already blogged about here.

Here’s what the distribution of numbers of accessions of varieties of the major food crops in genebanks looks like. Dark brown means lots of different accessions (not varieties, mind!).

One has to wonder what’s going on in Spain. As I say, it’s a work in progress. A certain amount of data cleaning may still be necessary, for example to identify duplicates and take them out of the equation. And when Genebank Database Hell allows it should even be possible to take into account morphological and genetic diversity.

Anyway, here’s the distribution of richness of wild relative and landrace accessions of a number of major crops. Green means lots of species and landraces.

When finished, I think these maps will make a great complement to the Nature Conservancy’s Atlas. But would the biodiversity community be interested?