GIS – Page 41 – Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

April 19, 2018April 20, 2018

Yes, we have plenty of banana information

I’ve come across a number of banana-related resources lately, so I thought I’d pull them all together in one post.

First, there’s CropMapper.org, from Bioversity, which “aims to collect, to make available and to share spatial information on global banana production in a single centralized database.”

Then there’s “Banana natural biodiversity mapping,” from iNaturalist. It’s objective is “to map the distribution of CWRs and landraces in primary and secondary centers of diversity” through crowdsourcing. Which I suppose could eventually be added to the more conventionally sourced data in the CWR Atlas.

And finally there’s blog post from IITA describing a project to document banana diversity in the Democratic Republic of Congo using morphological traits that have been overlooked in the past. I assume the data will find its way into the Musa Germplasm Information System. And thence to Genesys.

All these contribute to answering a question that I asked here back in 2010: Where do bananas grow anyway? What I still don’t see, though, is a way to bring all this information together in one place.

And, given that there’s collecting going on as we speak, for example, the information — and the need — will only grow:

Researchers from the Meise Botanic Garden (Belgium), Plant Resources Center (Vietnam) and Millenium Seed Bank (UK) are in northern Vietnam to study and collect wild bananas. Follow their progress at #banana_expedition_2018. https://t.co/FIVObVECRS

— ProMusa (@promusa_banana) April 19, 2018

April 18, 2018April 19, 2018

A Nibble big enough to choke on

Yeah, yeah, it’s been quiet here for the best part of a month. Work, you know. When you notice lack of action here, though, that doesn’t mean that I’m being completely idle. Not always, anyway. Check on Twitter and Facebook, if you dare, and you’ll see new stuff on a fairly regular basis, because that’s easier to do than a fully-fledged blog post. Anyway, what I’ll do here is a mega-Nibble hoovering up snippets from the past few weeks that I posted on social media but not here.

Vegetable History 101.
If you have a heirloom of one of the above to name, try this neural network approach.
Just as long as the name doesn’t end up being racist.
It’s too late for some German veggies. Though not, it seems, for German forests. What’s the difference?
Not yet too late for Tanzanian wild veggies, but winter is coming. Maybe giving them cool names would help.
And for some North American indigenous crops too, thanks to some committed people.
And for beans in Mexico for that matter.
Why all the above is important.
And urgent.
And this is the resulting problem if you ignore that lesson.
You see, the Australians are on the case, with their bush tucker fixation.
Mind you, it’s not all sweetness and light: the quinoa bubble bursts.
Maybe we can make a game of this diversification lark. Oh, look, it seems we can.
You can even breed for it.
Wherein I pontificate about genebank data. Again.
Maybe these guys will listen?
These guys obviously did, and built a better peanut.
Yeah, but can you see them from space?
The cost of ending hunger. The cost of ensuring crop diversity conservation in genebanks seems, well, peanuts.
The archaeology of gardens. Two of my favourite topics, combined. If only there was beer too. And peanuts.
A banana is a banana is a banana. Not.
All those bananas? You can help to map them.
They’ll put them on Google Earth next, like Kew did for these beautiful natural areas, with all their crop wild relatives :)
A Japanese agricultural encyclopaedia. Illustrated to boot.
Or, for the more Euro-centric, food art at the Met…
This cheese should probably be at the Met there too.
And this weed strain may well soon be on sale in the gift shop.
The sweet potato made it to Oceania on its own.
Oh no it didn’t.
On the other hand, livestock generally need to be accompanied.
All the yeast belong China.

April 9, 2018April 9, 2018

Where to find stressed rice in Nigeria

So last week’s Brainfood led with a paper mapping various abiotic stresses affecting rice in Africa, noting that the next step would be to mash up the results with germplasm provenances.

Well, I decided to do it myself. Here’s the distribution of “iron-rich soils” in Nigeria and potentially affected rice area (the paper’s Fig. 8b), the latter coming from the SPAM project we have alluded to before as a source of data on crop cultivation.

The yellow rings are African rice landraces, the red dots all rice landraces, both from Genesys. If you click on the map, you’ll see it much better, and notice that there’s not much rice germplasm from the more brownish areas, denoting rice cultivation areas with Fe-richer soils. Should these be targets for collecting? Kind of depends if landraces are still grown in those places, but it’s a start.

March 26, 2018March 26, 2018

Brainfood: Mesoamerican fruits, PES, Chinese vegetables, Controlled pollination, Pastoralist fodder, Taxonomy, African nightshades, Ag origins, Divortification

Human diets drive range expansion of megafauna-dispersed fruit species. Megafauna dropped the ball (or the fruit), humans picked it up and ran with it.
Experimental evidence on payments for forest commons conservation. Maybe we should have paid the megafauna.
Vegetable genetic resources in China. 3 genebanks, 36,000 accessions, 120 species, about 1000 distributions per year (to research units).
A cost-effective ground pollination system for hybridization in tall coconut palms. I have seen the future of coconut pollination.
Determinants of pastoral and agro-pastoral households’ participation in fodder production in Makueni and Kajiado Counties, Kenya. Household heads who are female, have access to extension services, or are members of social groups are more likely to go in for fodder production.
Taxonomy based on science is necessary for global conservation. Incredible to me that needs to be said.
Development of next-generation sequencing (NGS)-based SSRs in African nightshades: Tools for analyzing genetic diversity for conservation and breeding. Solanum scabrum and S. villosum separate nicely, and show much diversity.
A natural adaptive syndrome as a model for the origins of cereal agriculture. Large seed, awns and monodominance.
Development and Examination of Sweet Potato Flour Fortified with Indigenous Underutilized Seasonal Vegetables. Ticks all the boxes, lets call it divortification.

March 12, 2018March 9, 2018

Brainfood: Core collections, Food system sustainability, Sunflower breeding, Modern/traditional mosaic, Nepal earthquake response, Modelling erosion, Folate in potato, Argentinian andigena, Millet evaluation, Pigeonpea evaluation, Sugarcane evaluation, Bean drought genes, Threatened trees

An informational view of accession rarity and allele specificity in germplasm banks for management and conservation. Basically a better way of making cores.
Multi-indicator sustainability assessment of global food systems. Thankfully includes both “Shannon Diversity of Food Supply” and “Food Production Diversity”. No sign of the Agrobiodiversity Index, though, alas.
Cytoplasmic Diversity Studies in Sunflower (Helianthus annuus L.): A Review. Have the wild relatives to thank for it.
Mosaic of Traditional and Modern Agriculture Systems for Enhancing Resilience. Refers specifically to rice irrigation systems, but could be generalizable, why not?
Post-disaster agricultural transitions in Nepal. To cardamon, mainly.
Simulating the Impacts of Climate Variability and Change on Crop Varietal Diversity in Mali (West-Africa) Using Agent-Based Modeling Approach. Less favourable and unstable climatic conditions lead to loss of diversity.
Genetic Diversity in Argentine Andean Potatoes by Means of Functional Markers. There’s a small group of weird, interesting ones.
Single Nucleotide Polymorphism (SNP) markers associated with high folate content in wild potato species. Ten-fold variation in content in in F2 population derived from cross between high folate diploid clone of wild Solanum boliviense and low/medium folate diploid S. tuberosum. Nice.
Identification of new sources of resistance for pearl millet downy mildew disease under field conditions. 20 really good ones out of 101. Could have been worse.
Assay of Genetic Architecture for Identification of Waterlogging Tolerant Pigeonpea Germplasm. 38 out of 128 survived. People are lucky this week.
Phenotypic evaluation of a diversity panel selected from the world collection of sugarcane (Saccharum spp) and related grasses. Out of 300, 27 were higher than commercial standards in dry or fresh mass. On a roll here.
Genotyping by Sequencing and Genome–Environment Associations in Wild Common Bean Predict Widespread Divergent Adaptation to Drought. Two genes identified. Let’s quit while we’re ahead. No, come on, let’s do another one.
Tree genetic resources at risk in South America: A spatial threat assessment to prioritize populations for conservation. 7 of 80 socieconomically important trees threatened across their range. Damn.