- NY Botanical Garden launches summer Edible Garden celebration.
- Thingy for getting more syrup out of maples invented.
- Farmer floods his fields on purpose.
- Insights into tomato late-blight resistance. Do try and keep up!
- A very English guerrilla gardener.
- Pictures of weird fruits and vegetables.
- Russian starters. Uhm, I spot a trend.
- The future of aquaculture: giant robotic roaming cages.
- Saving California’s Sebastopol Gravenstein apple.
- “Zeytinburnu Medicinal Plant Garden, opened in 2005, is Turkey’s first and only medicinal plant garden.”
- Something else has it in for bees: Chinese hornets.
Nibbles: Seed travels, Carotenoids in cucumbers, Tea and hibiscus, Sea level rise, Tewolde on climate change, SPGRC
- After a year’s travel in search of seeds, Adam Forbes turns in his report.
- The genetics of orange-fleshed cucumbers elucidated.
- Tea and hibiscus booze.
- Video of honey harvesting.
- Maps of sea level rise. All somewhat unsatisfying, somehow.
- “Because we are poor, we shall suffer first but, ultimately, we shall all die together.”
- SADC Plant Genetic Resources Centre (SPGRC) director Paul Munyenyembe does the public awareness thing.
No little houses on this prairie
I promised you more on the Doolittle Prairie, and here it is. But first, thanks to Candy Gardner for arranging the visit, and to Mark Widrlechner for leading the tour.
Doolittle Prairie State Preserve, near Story City in Iowa, is a small remnant of native tallgrass prairie. The 26-acre state-owned protected area supports about 220 plant species. ((You can download a prairie species dataset from Dr Brian J Wisley’s webpage. Look among his publications for: Wilsey, B.J. Martin, L.M. and H.W. Polley. 2005a. Predicting plant extinction based on species-area curves in prairie fragments with high beta richness. Conservation Biology. 19:1835-1841.)) About half of the area, the northern part, has never been ploughed or grazed, though hay was cut until the 60s. The southern part has been grazed, and the southwest corner ploughed until 1965 and then replanted with seed from the northern section. All around are fields of maize and soybean. Management is by cutting and burning, to keep down exotics, and encroaching shrubs and trees.
It’s a very evocative place. You can just imagine the deer and the buffalo roaming on it back in the day. There are still deer. Buffalo, not so much. ((Though I did see buffalo nearby.)) It’s also pretty interesting from an agrobiodiversity perspective, because it’s got quite a number of crop wild relatives for such a small place.
A couple of species of wild sunflowers, for example. This one is Helianthus rigidus:
There are also native species of Allium, Elymus, Lactuca, Fragaria, Prunus, Ribes, Rubus, and Vitis:
All in a beautifully colorful setting, at least at this time of the year.
So, a bit of a CWR hotspot, in its own small way, and protected to boot. You may remember the recent global review of the role of protected areas in CWR conservation. I don’t think that CWR have been mapped in the US in the same way as has been done in Russia, however. ((They have, however, been inventoried. See Appendix A of the United States country report for the first State of the World Report. Thanks to Karen for the tip.)) Once you have geo-referenced CWR locations, you could easily mash the result up with the online map of protected areas to see which national parks and reserves contribute most to CWR conservation. Anybody out there working on this? I bet little Doolittle Prairie would be on that list.
Nibbles: Seed Conference, High carotenoid bananas, DIVA-GIS, Protected area map, Pulse domestication, Food policy, Torreya rewilding
- The 2nd World Seed Conference is coming up soon.
- Orange bananas make it big in the Solomon Islands. Thanks, Lois.
- DIVA-GIS website gets a makeover. Watch out for the blog.
- Global protected areas map mashed up.
- Dorian Fuller blogs lentil and bean domestication.
- Bookforum.com does food.
- While people discuss the pros and cons of assisted migration, one group has actually gone out and done it.
“It was serendipity that we had the seeds lying around”
Our title is evolutionary geneticist Arthur Weis to journalist Carl Zimmer on the topic of an experiment he and colleagues at UC Irvine carried out a few years ago where they compared those seeds — that had been “lying around” in the intervening few years in a cool, dry place — with seeds of the same species newly collected from the same sites. The result of the experiment was that…
…[t]he newer plants grew to smaller sizes, produced fewer flowers, and, most dramatically, produced those flowers eight days earlier in the spring. The changing climate had, in other words, driven the field mustard plants to evolve over just a few years.
The point of Zimmer’s article is that evolution can take place over short periods of time, and that because of climate change “life will undergo an evolutionary explosion.” ((We’ve blogged about this before.)) What Zimmer doesn’t say is that we have about 6.5 million similar samples of seeds in the world’s crop genebanks, and not by serendipity. Some date back decades. There would be a great research programme in comparing the genetic makeup of those samples with newer samples. Assuming that the populations are still there. And that there is enough documentation associated with the samples to find their original collecting sites.
A final thought. The assumptions behind the ecological niche modeling work which has been proliferating of late to predict changes in distributions, for example of crop wild relatives, is that the species don’t move or evolve fast enough to keep pace with climate change. They may well in fact evolve, adapt and survive, and that would certainly be a good thing. But helping them do that through in situ protection should not be an argument for downplaying the complementary importance of ex situ conservation. After all, with the kind of selection pressures likely to be involved, populations are very likely to be significantly genetically narrower in the future. Whether the species adapts or not, we’ll still need to collect seeds and store them in genebanks if we are to have available for use as much as possible of the genetic diversity that is currently — just — still in the field.