Category: Information

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Mashing up 3d trees and crop wild relatives

I’ve been exploring Google’s 3d trees thing a bit, to work out just how cool it is. I said in my previous post on this that it could eventually be used to document and virtually explore field genebanks (of coconuts, say, or breadfruit). But of course you can explore a few forests around the world right now, so I wondered if any crop wild relatives have been collected in any of these places.

The answer is, alas, no, at least for Surui Forest in Brazil, one of the couple of “wild” places for which Google currently has 3d trees (the others are urban areas). At left you can see the distribution of accessions of crop wild relatives in Brazil, according to Genesys. Unfortunately, none fall within the area for which Google has 3d data.

I did get a hit in GBIF for a cultivated cassava just outside the forest. But that’s not quite the same, I agree. Oh well, maybe we’ll soon have more data. 1

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Nibbles: Disease, Tobacco, CGIAR, Food Security, Nutrition, Soil, Popcorn, Quinoa, Aegilops

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Nibbles: Australia, China, Turkey, Slovenia, Soybeans, Grapes, Consultation

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The revival of taro biodiversity in Hawaii, in film

This just in from a reader in Hawaii. Thanks, Penny.

The film short “Na Ono o Ka Aina; Delicacies of the Land” featuring Jerry Konanui, a Hawaiian, expert in the identification of traditional Hawaiian taro cultivars, and an inspiration in their recovery. This film is the work of award winning Hawaii-based filmmakers, Na Maka o Ka Aina. The film garnered awards at the Aotearoa (New Zealand) and Hawaii film festivals in 2009 and 2010, and the short was featured on National Geographic’s “All Roads Film Festival” in 2008. One way to protect local crop biodiversity — reinspire everyone — from farmers to researchers to students; especially within the community that once created that diversity. It’s in the numbers; the more old cultivars we recover and grow and the more who grow, the less risk of loss we will have. You can get a taste of the film short — and the ono (delicious) taros of Hawaii below.