The day after the Global Tree Assessment is published by BGCI, which revealed there are about 60,000 tree species in the world, is also a good time to link again to the wonderful European Atlas of Forest Tree Species. Now all we need is the same thing for Brazil, which has about 9,000 of those 60,000. BTW, a very quick check suggests that about 1% of trees are crop wild relatives, globally. More on this later.
Plants of the World Online is online
Great to see the launch of Kew’s Plants of the World Online portal.
In 2015, the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew launched its first Science Strategy establishing its vision to document and understand global plant and fungal diversity and their uses, bringing authoritative expertise to bear on the critical challenges facing humanity today. The Science Strategy also committed Kew to delivering nine strategic outputs with the overarching aim to disseminate Kew’s scientific knowledge of plants and fungi to maximize its impact in science, education, conservation policy and management. The Plants of the World Online portal (POWO), is one of the nine strategic outputs and its aim is to enable users to access information on all the world’s known seed-bearing plants by 2020…
…Ultimately, POWO will become a single point of access for authoritative plant species information, a multi-dimensional catalogue of plant life, including information on identification, distribution, traits, conservation, molecular phylogenies and uses. The codebase is open source and Kew hopes to support existing partner networks to set up their own portals, creating a distributed network of botanical data hubs. POWO aims to become a resource that has global coverage which can empower and inform citizens, policy makers, conservationists and farmers everywhere, about the importance of plants and fungi to life. In addition, a key function of POWO is to ensure that Kew’s floristic data can be harvested and ingested by the World Flora Online (WFO) portal enabling Kew to support the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation (GSPC) Target 1 2020.
And speaking of harvesting and ingesting, it even has crops! As it develops, I do hope it will include links to genebank and botanical garden collections.
Oh, and since I’m on Kew, don’t forget this year’s State of the World’s Plants Symposium is coming up. Last year there was a section on crop wild relatives. Nothing so agricultural on this occasion, but lots of interesting topics nevertheless.
Nibbles: Mango genebank, Japanese elite fruit, Mother Hass, African cattle diversity, New wild ginger, Seed saving, False ivory, ABS, Deforestation, Blight causes, Desert ag, Conserving potatoes, Imperial botany
- Goa to set up a mango genebank. Where do I donate?
- The murky world of really expensive Japanese fruit.
- What is this one avocado tree worth?
- The importance of indigenous African cattle breeds.
- You can never have too many wild ginger species.
- Saving seeds in South Carolina.
- Seeds save elephants.
- IFPRI meeting discusses the increasing complexity of germplasm access and benefit sharing.
- Food giants look to their greenify their value chains. Will they finally decide to secure their genetic base too?
- Irish potato famine: don’t blame the near-fungus.
- Chinese oasis is engineering wonder: and the crops?
- Pachamama and the ever-so-humble potato.
- Review of book on the imperial origins of botany.
Genebank opportunity in the UK
The John Innes Centre has an exciting manager vacancy for its Germplasm Resource Unit (GRU). This facility houses materials essential for the injection of new genetic diversity into crop breeding programmes and the identification of genes controlling key traits.
Interested? You can find out more about the genebank on the JIC website. The data in WIEWS is a little bit out of date, but it gives an overview that’s difficult to get from the genebank’s webpage. The overview page on Genesys has more up-to-date information, but it seems only for wheat, barley and pea.
Anyway, I suppose this means that our friend Mike Ambrose, currently the genebank manager, is retiring. We’ll miss you, Mike.
Nibbles: Give a man a chicken, Pollinator selection, Bananapocalypse redux, Red kiwi, ICARDA genebank, Dark comms, Food design, Traditional diets, Revitalizing villages, Peruvian diversity, Moving botany
- Which should come first, the chicken or the cash? MIL unavailable for comment.
- Pollinators are mini plant breeders.
- Save the Cavendish! No, wait…
- There’s a red kiwi coming. Eventually. No, not left-wing New Zealanders.
- ICARDA decentralizes its genebank. But we knew that.
- GFAR webinars on communicating research.
- Designing food. What could possibly go wrong?
- Decolonize it instead.
- Ecotourism in Portugal. No word on whether decolonized food involved.
- Kickstarter on documenting food crops in Peru, decolonized or not.
- Tracing the colonization and (hopefully) decolonization of economic botany products. Fascinating idea.