To commemorate its 80th anniversary, FAO plans to recognize some of these outstanding best practices and innovative approaches in sustainable plant production and protection, which have occurred in the last 40 years.
And among the technical areas being considered is — wait for it… “Management of crop germplasm, including collecting, conservation, characterization, evaluation, documentation, and distribution of plant genetic resources for food and agriculture”!
A bit of a roundup of data stuff today. Things have been piling up in my to-blog folder, and the time has come to tidy up.
First up, and most relevant here, is the webinar on how to use Genesys. It’s long, admittedly, but well worth it if you have anything to do with genebanks. Genesys can accommodate phenomic data, of course, and coincidentally here’s a set of training materials on how to do characterization and evaluation of plant genetic resources.
The botanic gardens community has its own Genesys-type thing, called PlantSearch, and there’s been an upgrade recently that readers here might be interested in. All that’s missing for the trifecta is herbaria :)
Finally, you might want to combine provenance data from Genesys (or indeed the forest genetic resources databases we blogged about earlier this week) with different features of the environment, right? Right. So let me quickly point to new spatial datasets on the world’s soils and agro-ecological zonation (which, interestingly, allows you to upload the sort of KML files that Genesys can spit out), the extent of cropland in Africa, and — why not? — the global distribution of cattle, goats, sheep and horses.
At least some of the data behind the forest report is to be found in FAO’s new global information system, SilvaGRIS, launched at the same time. SilvaGRIS joins a fairly crowded field — or perhaps I should forest — which includes various products from the World Agroforestry Centre, the restoration-focused Tree Diversity database, and Europe’s own portal EUFGIS. No doubt each does something different, but a guide through the thicket of resources might be useful.
What has the US National Plant Germplasm System ever done for anyone? The Guardian, the NY Times and NPR News lay it out. I guess someone in D.C. needs it laid out, but will it make any difference?
Everyone: Potatoes in Florida! Breeders: No problem. NPGS: You called?
Here’s The Guardian again, but this time thinking it is making the case for not putting seeds in the fridge, whereas in fact it’s making the case for the complementarity of ex situ and on-farm conservation.
Speaking of on-farm conservation, here’s a couple of pieces on community seed banks in Guatemala.
Speaking of on-farm conservation, here’s the heart-warming story of Welsh organic farmer Gerald Miles.
Meanwhile, the World Vegetable Centre opens a new genebank.
And Türkiye hosts an international, no less, olive genebank.
And genebanks can be so beautiful, like works of art. Former Tate Modern director Vicente Todolí lays out his citrus samples. I wonder what he could do with olives.
Botanic gardens are beautiful and often act a little bit like crop genebanks. Here’s an example from Portugal I stumbled onto recently, I forget how.
You know what I’d like to see? An international pepper genebank, that’s what. No, not the kind that might be in those Guatemalan community seedbanks or the WorldVeg genebank. This sort of pepper. Piper pepper.
I bet the ancient Egyptians had pepper. Egyptian archaeologist Mennat-Allah El Dorry lays out what else they had.
Maybe you could lay out world history using pepper. You can definitely do so using cacao and chocolate.