In situ

June 20, 2011June 20, 2011

Collecting to restore

We blogged recently about the huge fire in Arizona and what it may be doing to crop wild relatives. In southern California, however, they’re doing something more than just wringing their hands with worry. They’re going out and collecting seeds, that could later be used for restoration, as part of a project called Seeds of Success.

Once back at Rancho Santa Ana, the team dries the seeds in their paper bags, boxes them up and sends them to the national Bend Seed Extractory in Bend, Ore. There they are sorted and X-rayed to see whether they are viable, and then scientists go to work trying to find out how to get them to germinate.
…
Part of each seed lot is stored at the U.S. National Seed Bank as an insurance policy against future threats such as climate change, and some go to native plant researchers with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The trove also is shared with the Kew Millennium Seed Bank operated by the Royal Botanic Garden in England, which aims to save 25 percent of the world’s plant species by 2020.

In some mountain areas, they’ll really have to hurry.

June 19, 2011June 19, 2011

Mujib Nature Reserve has interesting plants too

So the Mujib Nature Reserve, “Jordan’s jewel of eco-tourism,” is poised to be promoted to UNESCO Biosphere Reserve. There have been ethnopharmacological studies of the flora of the site, which has even been used to “test models to improve the conservation of medicinal and herbal plants and the livelihood of rural communities through the management, and sustainable use of medicinal and herbal (M/H) plants for human and livestock needs.” And the flora baseline survey for the reserve is listed in Jordan’s monitoring system for implementation of the Global Plan of Action on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture as being part of the country’s efforts to “promote in situ conservation of crop wild relatives.” Wonderful. But I got all that by googling. Why is not more made of the plants on the page devoted to the reserve on the website of Jordan’s Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature, along with the Long-legged Buzzard and the Eurasian Badger? And yes, that’s a rhetorical question.

June 13, 2011June 13, 2011

Brainfood: Bean diversity, Rice domestication, Microbial interactions squared, Threat of extinction, Agroforestry, Species diversity

Population structure and genetic differentiation among the USDA common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) core collection. Subpopulations detected within usual Middle American and Andean genepools. The former was more diverse. Diversity was lower for domestication loci. One wonders whether game worth candle.
Artificial selection for a green revolution gene during japonica rice domestication. There’s nothing new under the sun. Fuller fills us in.
Positive plant microbial interactions in perennial ryegrass dairy pasture systems. Plant-microbe interactions can have significant positive impact on production of, and chemical inputs into and losses from, perennial ryegrass dairy pasture systems. Gotta love that agrobiodiversity.
Plant growth promoting potential of Pontibacter niistensis in cowpea (Vigna unguiculata (L.) Walp.). And another one. New bacterium from Western Ghats fertilizes soil and helps cowpea to grow.
Extinction risk and diversification are linked in a plant biodiversity hotspot. That would the Cape. Extinction threat (IUCN categories) is better explained by phylogeny than by human activity or plant traits. Go figure.
The framework tree species approach to conserve medicinal trees in Uganda. Sort of like artificial keystone species. Lots of other cool stuff in the same issue of Agroforestry Systems.
Use of topographic variability for assessing plant diversity in agricultural landscapes. By and large, more environmental variability means more plant diversity, in Switzerland. Maybe some crop wild relatives in there?

June 10, 2011March 4, 2016

Selling seed of orphan crops in Kenya

The latest episode of BBC’s Horizon programme deals with a number of things we’ve blogged about here before, for example soil mapping in Africa and biochar. But the payoff for us here is the last segment, which is on a Kenyan seed company called Leldet, which…

…now offers farmers the opportunity to buy different varieties of previously forgotten under-utilised seeds, more suitable for the area. They supply them in smaller quantities so farmers aren’t over reliant on one crop.

Watch it quick, because I don’t know how long it will stay on the site.

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?