Category: GIS

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Botanic gardens conserve crop diversity too

We forget sometimes, in our cosy little crop genebank world, that botanic gardens do ex situ conservation of agricultural biodiversity too. 1 Witness the Royal Botanic Gardens Endinburgh and the Really Wild Vegetable Project. I only know about it because they tweeted on it earlier today, and the tweet caught my eye because it mentioned wild cabbage, and had a nice picture too. It turns out, however, that the particular population of wild Brassica oleracea oleracea involved is not in the national UK inventory of crop genetic resources as known by Eurisco, and thus Genesys, which basically just sucks up Eurisco data. 2

That only includes material from the Warwick Genetic Resources Unit, which happens to be mainly from the southern part of the UK. So the material mentioned in the Edinburgh tweet, which comes from Fife in Scotland, is likely to add significant diversity to the “national” collection at Warwick. Scope for some closer collaboration between these two institutes? Well, maybe it’s already there and I haven’t caught it. Do let me know if I’m being unfair.

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Nibbles: Landscapes pod, Tartiness evolution, Diversity pix, Eve Crowley vid, Commons debate, Subsidies, Arabidopsis database, Beard beer, Kew herbarium vid, Minoan pests, FDish seeds, Extinction is forever

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One more cup of coffee

For some reason, there’s been a sackful of coffee stories lately. Here’s a quick summary:

“Pistols for two, and coffee for one.”

“[Coffee] is of excellent Use in the time of Pestilence, and contributes greatly to prevent the spreading of Infection.”

“We just had to try at least a cup in every village we stopped at, and as they were small cups, sometimes more than one… The irony is that I am a ‘tea-only girl’.”

“Yes, Starbucks has announced it’s taking up shop in Bogota, Colombia. It says it wants to celebrate Colombian coffee.”

“Here, we do not work hard for survival, but we work hard to live a better life; that is what I’ve learned from working on this plantation.”

“In order to create these pre-breeding populations with enough genetic diversity for these economically important traits, WCR 3 will utilize genetic material from the current germplasm collections as well as new material coming from wild populations from the WCR GERMPLASM Project.”

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Brainfood: Crop genomics, Phenotyping, Smallholders and markets, Yacon diversity, Indian rice HYVs, Sustainable landscapes, Climate models, Food prices

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Wild sorghum and aridity

I’m not entirely sure why, but I get the occasional alert from something called the FAO GeoNetwork when a new dataset comes online. This morning it was global aridity. It’s not really very detailed or anything, but when something like that is available in a format that Google Earth can handle, I can very rarely resist the temptation of clicking on the link. So, in case you’re interested, this map shows the distribution of African wild Sorghum accessions in Genesys (that’s the little blue dots, which you’ll be able to see better if you click on the image — sorry about that) superimposed on that aridity thing.

arid sorghum

This suggests to me that if you want really drought-tolerant wild Sorghum germplasm, the Sahel is where to look, rather than southern Africa or South Asia. But what about Australia, I hear you ask? Well, Genesys doesn’t have any wild sorghum from Australia, but GBIF does.

sorghum Australia

Here we’re looking at herbarium specimens, remember, rather than genebank accessions, but it does seem that Australia may be a slightly better bet for aridity-adapted wild sorghums than Africa. But for hyper-arid adaptation, it’s the Sahara for you.