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May 17, 2017March 4, 2018

Mapping crops: Are we there yet?

I ran across a bunch of nice crop maps on the internet ((Though there are some strange things about a couple of them. Check out the shea one, for example.)), so I made a GIF for you (click on it to get it cycling).

You’re welcome.

I’m reliably informed the source is Monfreda et al. (2008). You can download the data in multiple formats, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen the headline maps displayed all together as The Decolonial Atlas has done, albeit without attribution, which is naughty.

Anyway, people have obviously taken the trouble to download and play around with the data. For example, they have been ably mashed up by Bioversity to get a global crop diversity map.

Which, in turn, it is instructive to compare with the one from the Lancet Planetary Health map we blogged about a few days ago.

But which dataset to use to do this kind of stuff? Monfreda’s is only one of many.

I see that we now, after a long wait, have WordClim 2, thanks to the work of our friend Robert Hijmans and his colleagues. ((Not to mention climate surfaces going back 20,000 years.)) Is it too much to hope for that he’ll now turn his hand to producing the definitive crop distribution dataset? ((Yes, we’ve blogged about this before. More than once.)) Maybe something for the CGIAR’s Big Data Platform, just launched, to think about organizing, convening, and/or inspiring.

May 15, 2017May 15, 2017

Brainfood: Canola model, Saline dates, High rice, Perennial wheat, European cowpea, Mesoamerican oil palm, Seed viability, Citrus identity, Poor cassava, Horse domestication, Wild tomatoes, Tea genome, Veggie breeding, Classical brassicas

Development of a Statistical Crop Model to Explain the Relationship between Seed Yield and Phenotypic Diversity within the Brassica napus Genepool. Look for primary raceme area.
Screening of Date Palm (Phoenix dactylifera L.) Cultivars for Salinity Tolerance. In Oman, Manoma and Umsila are particularly tolerant.
Genetic structure and isolation by altitude in rice landraces of Yunnan, China revealed by nucleotide and microsatellite marker polymorphisms. Geneflow is horizontal, adaptation vertical.
Breeding Perennial Grain Crops Based on Wheat. By adding a wild genome.
European cowpea landraces for a more sustainable agriculture system and novel foods. 24 of them, no less. But you have to start somewhere, I suppose.
Genetic diversity of Elaeis oleifera (HBK) Cortes populations using cross species SSRs: implication’s for germplasm utilization and conservation. From 532 palms in 19 populations to 34 individuals.
Large-Scale Screening of Intact Tomato Seeds for Viability Using Near Infrared Reflectance Spectroscopy (NIRS). Good-bye germination tests?
Genetic identification of ‘Limau Kacang’ (Citrus sp.), a local mandarin cultivated in West Sumatra by sequence-related amplified polymorphism (SRAP). It’s a ponkan.
Cassava haplotype map highlights fixation of deleterious mutations during clonal propagation. Cassava is decaying genetically, but breeders are helping.
Ancient genomic changes associated with domestication of the horse. The ancient DNA of immediate post-domestication horses suggests that the stallion bottleneck happened later.
Genetic Diversity and Population Structure of Two Tomato Species from the Galapagos Islands. They mirror island formation.
The Tea Tree Genome Provides Insights into Tea Flavor and Independent Evolution of Caffeine Biosynthesis. It evolved caffeine independently of coffee but not cacao. And flavour is down to a whole genome duplication.
The contribution of international vegetable breeding to private seed companies in India. It can still make one, but for traits rather than varieties.
Domestication, diversity and use of Brassica oleracea L., based on ancient Greek and Latin texts. Their use as a hangover cure has a long and august pedigree. No word on their raceme area.

May 11, 2017May 12, 2017

EucarpiaGR2017: better late than never

Oh gosh, I forgot to give the obligatory shout-out to the EUCARPIA meeting, this year on “Mobilizing the green gold of plant genetic resources.” Silly me. Follow what’s left on #eucarpiaGR2017, there’s some really interesting stuff on.

The Doyen of seed system research Mauricio Bellon presented new data and analyses from sites around the world. #eucarpiaGR2017 pic.twitter.com/4bydfiY43c

— Ola Westengen (@OlaWestengen) May 11, 2017

LATER: Oh, and compare and contrast with this:

May 11, 2017

Nibbles: Rice in Trinidad, Sweet potatoes in Ethiopia, EU crop diversity double, Sir Peter on the ginkgo, Forages, Brazilian peanuts, Seed moisture, Phenotyping double, Svalbard deposit, CATIE data, Herbarium double, Seed #resistance, Father of the apple, Agave congress

African rice out of Africa, and out of the genebank.
The other way around for sweet potato.
Markers for micronutrients. And diversity for taste…
The deep history of the ginkgo.
Study plants to decrease the effects of burping.
Brazil rationalizes peanut collections.
Measuring moisture in seeds.
Big data for better seeds. And not only in Iowa.
NZ seeds in Svalbard.
CATIE on Genesys.
Oz biosecurity fail. Better stick to online.
I want to be a seed rebel too.
Maybe in Kazakhstan?
Agave under the volcano under the cosh.

May 9, 2017May 9, 2017

Mapping the Indian collection

Always happens this way. No sooner do I find something interesting, that something similar turns up. Case in point my post last week on the Seedlot Selection Tool. It was just a few hours after I happened across the SST that I ran into NBPGR’s PGR-Clim. Ok, it’s not quite the same thing, but almost.

PGR-Clim maps out the Indian genebank’s holdings of chickpea, pearl millet, pigeonpea, sorghum and wheat on a background of rainfall and temperature now, in the 2020s and in the 2040s.

For example, here’s what the pigeonpea collection looks like relative to todays’s temperatures.

And this is relative to the temperature in the 2040s.

So it is possible now to find a pigeonpea accession with the sort of climatic (or soil) adaptation you need, and request it from NBPGR. All you need to do is locate it on one of these images (which you can download), then somehow remember where it is and find it again on the interactive map that PGR-Clim also provides, separately. If you then click on it there, you get an accession number, which you can cut and paste into the search box of PGR Portal. Hey presto!