In situ

June 10, 2011June 20, 2011

Wallow Fire (may) threaten (some) wild beans. Maybe.

There’s a really bad fire spreading in Arizona. ((NASA Earth Observatory image created by Jesse Allen, using data provided courtesy of the University of Wisconsin’s Space Science and Engineering Center MODIS Direct Broadcast system. Caption by Holli Riebeek.))

You can donwload all kinds of stuff about it, and even post your experiences of it on Facebook. But can you find out whether any crop wild relatives are threatened by it? Well, sure: all you have to do is go off to GBIF, and choose a likely genus (Phaseolus, say), and download the records, and mash them up in Google Earth with the latest fire perimeter data or whatever. ((And can I take this opportunity of thanking Google for the Google Earth license?)) Like I’ve done here:

Coming in closer, and using the NASA GeoTIFF instead of the normal Google Earth imagery, you can put yourself in the position of being able to make some reasonably intelligent guesses about what might be happening to some of these populations, and the genepool as a whole in the area:

But what I really meant is that there ought to be a way to do this automagically, or something. Anyway, it is sobering to reflect that while all hell is breaking loose in Arizona, not that far away to the northeast, in the peaceful surroundings of the Denver Botanical Garden, Anasazi beans are enjoying their day in the sun, utterly oblivious of the mortal threat faced by some of their wild cousins. It’s a cruel world. And there’s a point in all this about the need for complementary conservation strategies that’s just waiting to be made. Isn’t there?

June 9, 2011June 20, 2011

More on visualizing collecting localities

Clearly short of something to say after the almighty media circus generated by the climate change hotspots publication, our friend Andy Jarvis is reduced to celebrating an embarassingly artificial milestone on the DAPA blog today. Normally I would treat such awkward space filling with the contempt it deserves, but today I’m in the mood to, well, fill space. So here goes.

Andy’s post is about the 90m-resolution digital elevation dataset he and his colleagues have been working on for ages. The milestone he trumpets is 750,000 visitors, but more important is the fact that the data is now visible in Google Earth, which I didn’t know. Here’s what a bit of Spain looks like with the normal Google Earth imagery, the records on show being from Genesys. ((BTW, thanks to Google for the Google Earth license.))

And this is what the same area looks like using the SRTM data:

Advantages to both, I suppose, from a purely aesthetic point of view.

Incidentally, some further playing around with Google Earth revealed a couple of collecting localities for Beta maritima (from GBIF this time) that are easily visible in Street View. Here’s an example, featuring a record from France’s Inventaire national du Patrimoine naturel (INPN), catalogue number INPN_21204166 in case you’re interested. ((Their website is worth exploring. If you do, you’ll find out, among other things, that Beta maritima, is found near the sea significantly more frequently than the average French plant. Unfortunately, the nifty plots and maps are not easily downloadable.))

June 8, 2011June 8, 2011

Protecting PI 198758 and its neighbours

Can’t resist a little follow-up to Jeremy’s biographical sketch of PI 198758, which as you’ll remember is a wild beet which hails from Le Pouliguen in France and has some coveted nematode resistance or other. If you look for the taxon in question (B. vulgaris subsp. maritima, and variations thereof) in GBIF, you get quite a few hits around the area of Le Pouliguen, which is in the Loire. And if you check that general region on Natura 2000 you realize that a lot of that coast is protected, whether under the Habitats Directive or the Birds Directive or whatever.

The question, of course, is whether the managers of such protected areas as Mor Braz (that’s the northern polygon on the map) and the Estuaire de la Loire Nord (the southern polygon) are aware of this or any other crop wild relative that may chance to occur in their charges. I suspect that even if you told them, alas, they would not much care. And yes, I know that some of those records seem to fall in the sea. Take it up with the Service du Patrimoine naturel, Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, who provided the original data to GBIF.

June 7, 2011June 7, 2011

Nibbles: ITPGRFA, Hotspots, Adaptation, Agrobiodiversity, Potatoes and climate change, Cowpeas and drought, Apios, Tree planting, Fairtrade, Egyptian archaeobotany, Bolivian video

All about the International Treaty on PGRFA.
More, much more, on that climate change hotspots study.
IDRC on climate change adaptation in Africa. Almost nothing on agricultural diversity as a coping mechanism.
Unlike this.
Or this, for that matter. Never knew the Basque country was such a hotbed of potato research.
Or…oh forget it.
What, in the name of all that is happy, is hopniss?
Danone buys some goodwill.
Fairtrade chocolate: this looks like it should be really important. Is it?
So, you say you want to know what plant remains were found in the baskets in Tutankhamun’s tomb?
Bolivian agricultural biodiversity, anyone?

June 6, 2011June 3, 2011

Brainfood: Baby’s veggies, Chickpea and drought, Vine cactus breeding, Paleolithic rabbits, California protected areas, Wild pigeonpea, Pecorino classification, Milk composition, Phenotyping, Wild peas

Vegetables by Stealth: an exploratory study investigating the introduction of vegetables in the weaning period. Sneaking them into the diet is the most common strategy used by mothers to introduce their kids to vegetables. Reeeeeally?
Assessment of Iranian chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) germplasms for drought tolerance. Four out of 150 local landraces showed promise. It really is a numbers game, isn’t it?
In situ induction of chromosome doubling in vine cacti (Cactaceae). Potentially valuable autopolyploids were produced. Not that it was easy or anything.
Who brought in the rabbits? Taphonomical analysis of Mousterian and Solutrean leporid accumulations from Gruta Do Caldeirão (Tomar, Portugal). People did, that’s who, but only during the later Upper Paleolithic. Before that it was mainly owls.
Protected areas in climate space: What will the future bring? Nothing good. Both novel and disappearing climates are over-represented in current protected areas, at least in California.
Progress in the utilization of Cajanus platycarpus (Benth.) Maesen in pigeonpea improvement. Baby steps.
Classification of pecorino cheeses using electronic nose combined with artificial neural network and comparison with GC-MS analysis of volatile compounds. Wait, there are different kinds of pecorino?
The need for country specific composition data on milk. Well, you’ve got me convinced.
Rate-distortion tradeoff to optimize high-throughput phenotyping systems. Application to X-ray images of seeds. So, let me get this straight, basically, gauging the optimal trade-off between speed and accuracy in high-throughput phenotyping systems depends on what you’re measuring? Who writes these grant applications?
Experimental growing of wild pea in Israel and its bearing on Near Eastern plant domestication. First pea growers were either very patient or very quick workers.