Category: In situ

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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.

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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?

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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.))

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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.

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