Terralingua’s Global Source Book on Biocultural Diversity is out and available for download as a pdf. And very impressive it is too. It looks at “worldwide experiences in an integrated approach to sustaining cultures and biodiversity” through some 50 or so case studies, of which one, from Peru, is on agrobiodiversity. Better than nothing, I guess.
Berry go Round
The latest Berry go Round — Number 10 — is up at 10,000 birds, whose proprietor, Mike, definitely gets it:
I love plants. You do too, whether you’re in touch with your vegephilia or not. Everything you eat or smoke and practically everything you drape on your body or put in your car to make it go derives directly or indirectly from the vegetable kingdom.
And for once, I’m not going to winge about the paucity of agricultural interest. There’s masses. Neglected species, citrus taxonomy, wild relatives, recipes, the whole enchilada. Check it out.
Climate change information discussed
CTA’s seminar to identify ways of improving access to climate change information for agriculture and rural development in ACP countries is off and running in Ouagadougou. There’s a blog to help you follow the proceedings. Agrobiodiversity is not explicitly listed as a theme, but I suspect it will come up.
What is a landrace anyway?
When plant genetic resources people are tired and emotional, and sometimes when they’re not, talk can turn to landraces. What are they? Can they be identified unequivocally? Can they be associated with a geographical location? Are names anything other than a convenient fiction? Whole chapters, if not entire books, have been written on the subject. ((I should know; I wrote one, five years ago, which I’d link to if it had been published.)) There are definitions aplenty, of course, but that’s not the same as an answer.
Wrapped up in the definitions, and the answers, are notions of genetic variability within the landrace population and an element of selection being needed to maintain the landrace’s properties and maybe guide it in new directions. But that, of course, is crucially affected by the breeding biology of the species concerned. Bluntly, species that are reproduced clonally, like figs, say, or potatoes, are unlikely to have any variability within the landrace while those that are obligate outbreeders, such as maize, are going to be much more variable within the population and likely to change over time too. And then there are inbreeders — beans like Phaseolus vulgaris — in which the landrace is probably a mixture of different genetically pretty uniform types, each of which may well breed true, although the proportions of each may vary from season to season and from place to place.
All of which is a long and roundabout introduction to three recent papers in Theoretical and Applied Genetics that tackle the problem of landrace identity, all of them using molecular markers.
Oat (Avena sativa) is normally self-pollinating, but occasional crossing does occur. So we would not expect much variation within a population. Good thing that, because Hermann Buerstmayr and his colleagues sampled DNA from only three individuals in each of 114 oat varieties gathered from around the world. ((Ref to come DOI 10.1007/s00122-008-0843-y))
Six million and counting
So the Missouri Botanical Garden herbarium reached its 6 millionth specimen. ((Incidentally, that’s about the number of germplasm accessions in all the world’s genebanks, give or take half a million.)) ((And another thing: if you’ve got nice photos of botanic gardens, you can enter them into a competition.)) Pretty impressive, as these things go, and as good an opportunity as any to sing the praises of natural history collections. The specimen in question is Anthurium centimillesimum, a new aroid species from Ecuador. I wonder if it will ever join the ranks of the world’s 35,000 cultivated plants.