Category: Information

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Wild fruit relatives threatened in Central Asia

Fauna & Flora International and Botanic Gardens Conservation International (BGCI) have published a Red List of Trees of Central Asia. This is part of the Global Trees Campaign.

The new report identifies 44 tree species in Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan as globally threatened with extinction. Many of these species occur in the unique fruit and nut forests of Central Asia, an estimated 90% of which have been destroyed in the past 50 years.

One of the threatened fruit trees is the red-fleshed Malus niedzwetzkyana, from Kyrgyzstan.

Working with the Kyrgyz National Academy of Sciences, the Global Trees Campaign is identifying populations of this rare tree in Kyrgyzstan and taking measures to improve their conservation. With distinctive red-fleshed fruit, the Niedzwetzky apple is an excellent flagship for the conservation and sustainable management of this beleagured forest type.

The report is available online.

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The great Gatsby teaching resource

The Gatsby Charitable Foundation, which funds plant science research in the UK, established Gatsby Plants as a National Teaching Facility for Plant Sciences 4 years ago. The project has received continued funding until 2011.

Gatsby Plants aims to enthuse undergraduate students to study plant science further through two initiatives which expose them to the exciting developments in plant science and the scientists leading this research. These are:

  • an annual Summer School for high-achieving 1st year undergraduate students from UK Universities
  • a Teaching Resource providing plant science lecturers with access to novel and inspiring teaching material

Very worthy. I’ve been having a look at the teaching materials in particular. You need to register to get access.

The majority of materials have been kindly contributed by members of the plant science research community (see Terms of Use for how to credit their efforts). Gatsby Plants has also negotiated access to material from some commercial organisations and is actively involved in generating novel content.

There’s a number of lectures with definite agrobiodiversity interest, for example one by Prof. Peter Beyer, University of Freiburg, Germany on “Golden Rice on a Mission” and another from Dr Peter Craufurd on “Crop Science for Development: A Journey from the Laboratory to Farmers’ Fields in the Tropics.” And another: Prof. Monique Simmonds of Kew entitled “Plants in our Lives: from Beauty to Death.” You get a video of the lecturer delivering the talk, with accompanying slides. If you want your students to view the lecture you contact Gatsby Plants and they send you a username and password which allows access to a URL.

You also get practicals (there’s one on pea genetics), images and movies.

I would imagine they could be very useful to trainers, although I must say it would have been nice to be able to also download the presentation and adapt it to one’s particular situation and audience. Anyone out there with training resources on agricultural biodiversity to share? How about on CWRs, for example?

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Nibbles: Taxonomy, Herbs, Animal domestication, Bio-char, Videos, French fries, Barcoding

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A.B. Chapman Lectures in Animal Breeding and Genetics

I’m informed by DAD-Net that the A.B. Chapman Lectures in Animal Breeding and Genetics have been presented annually at the University of Wisconsis-Madison since 1994 by leading international scholars in the genetic improvement of animals, and that this year’s lectures were given by Prof. Miguel Angel Toro, Departamento de Produccion Animal, Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, Spain, on May 4 and 5. Prof. Toro gave two talks, on “Principles of Conservation of Animal Genetic Resources” and on “Mating Allocation in Genomic Selection.” Did anyone out there see them, in particular the first, either in person or live on the internet? Let us know. In any case, it looks like they’ll eventually be available for downloading.