- Spanish-language article about the effort to save Ukraine’s genebank.
- Report on “Reducing inequalities for food security and nutrition” from the High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition (HLPE-FSN) of the Committee on World Food Security (CFS). They don’t say so explicitly, but genebanks can help with that.
- They can certainly help with breeding new olive varieties, which are much needed.
- Genebanks come in all shapes and sizes. Sometimes an apple orchard is also a genebank.
- Sometimes rice farmers are genebanks.
- I wonder how many genebanks conserve trees with edible leaves. This book doesn’t say, alas.
- The Australian Grains Genebank (AGG) gets a boost. No word on whether it will start conserving edible trees.
In Memoriam
Sad to report that two giants of our field have passed on.
Dr Melaku Worede helped establish the national genebank of Ethiopia in 1976 and led it for 14 years. He was a champion for the equal participation of farmers and local communities in the conservation and management of crop diversity.
Dr Miguel Holle was a teacher and plant explorer, a world expert on wild tomato genetic resources.
Both made indelible contributions to the conservation and use of plant genetic resources, on both the technical and policy side, over many years. They will be missed.
Brainfood: PGRFA prioritization, Endangerment value, Geo-genetic visualization tool, USDA quinoa collection, Wild sesame conservation, USDA genebanks & climate change, Clover genetic changes, Collecting Comoros cassava, Sunflower breeding history, Durum breeding, Rice genebank tools
- Prioritizing Colombian plant genetic resources for investment in research using indicators about the geographic origin, vulnerability status, economic benefits, and food security importance. Out of 345 species, 25 were high priority, including 15 potatoes, 3 tomatoes, 2 tree tomatoes, pineapple, cocoa, papaya, yacon and coffee.
- Quantifying Endangerment Value: a Promising Tool to Support Curation Decisions. Looks a bit like an extreme form of “vulnerability status” above.
- GGoutlieR: an R package to identify and visualize unusual geo-genetic patterns of biological samples. Looks a bit like a fancy version of “geographic origin” above.
- Phenotypic and genotypic resources for the USDA quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa) genebank accessions. The geo-genetic pattern was not particularly unusual, but still useful.
- Trans situ conservation strategies to conserve the extinction risk species, Sesamum prostratum Retz., a crop wild relative of sesame being endemic to coastal strand habitat: a case study. Ticks all the prioritization boxes I guess.
- Safeguarding plant genetic resources in the United States during global climate change. We should probably apply vulnerability assessments to stuff already in genebanks too.
- Limited genetic changes observed during in situ and ex situ conservation in Nordic populations of red clover (Trifolium pratense). Though if conservation is done right the stuff in genebanks should be fine.
- Collection and characterization of cassava germplasm in Comoros. Turned out to be a high priority for collecting.
- Fifty years of collecting wild Helianthus species for cultivated sunflower improvement. Good thing all this stuff was prioritized 50 years ago.
- The opportunity of using durum wheat landraces to tolerate drought stress: screening morpho-physiological components. 3 out of 8 Tunisian landraces tested are drought-tolerant. Prioritize for use?
- Tools for using the International Rice Genebank to breed for climate-resilient varieties. How to prioritize for use among 130,000 accessions rather than 8. No word on unusual geo-genetic patterns.
Nibbles: Milpa revival, Cretan olive, Lost apples, Moche meals, African agroecology, Global Tree Knowledge Platform, Issues in Agricultural Biodiversity
- Marketing the milpa.
- Marketing a traditional Cretan olive variety.
- Finding lost apples in New England. Now to market them.
- Taking new passion fruit varieties to market in Australia.
- Deconstructing Moche history, society and culture through compost and struggle meals. No sign of markets.
- Reviewing the state of agroecology in Africa. Does “economic diversification” count as marketing?
- The Global Tree Knowledge Platform must have stuff on marketing somewhere.
- The books series ISSUES IN AGRICULTURAL BIODIVERSITY, now free to download, has lots on marketing.
Tracing the spread of a map of the spread of the olive
There’s a nice map of the spread of the olive doing the rounds on Twitter.
But where does it come from?
As best as I can make out, the ultimate source seems to be an article on Vivid Maps. All the other maps and illustrations in the article are credited, but this one is not, so I’m thinking the author — Alex — made it him or herself, and a fine job they did too if so.
Where did they get the data? Difficult to say, but there’s a very similar map, though not nearly as nice, in an Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems article entitled Olive Growing in a Time of Change. And that has the following credit (slightly cleaned up, and link added):
Olive diffusion in the Mediterranean Basin. (Adapted from Morettini. 1950. Olivicoltura. REDA, Roma, Italia, by Rallo, L. 2005. In Rallo, L., Barranco, D., Caballero, J. M., Del Río, C., Martín, A., Tous, J. Trujillo, I. (Eds.). (2005). Las variedades de Olivo en España. Junta de Andalucia. Ministerio de Agricultura Pesca y Alimentación. Ediciones Mundi-Prensa, Madrid, España. We acknowledge the permission by authors, scientific editors and publishers).
Which doesn’t really help clarify things an awful lot. Recent work adds an eastern dimension to the spread of the crop.