Category: Information

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A second helping of rice

More today to satisfy your hunger for rice information, hot on the heels of the recent paper trying to explain the pattern of genetic variation across and within two subspecies of cultivated rice, discussed by Jeremy a couple of days ago.

First there’s a paper ((Global Dissemination of a Single Mutation Conferring White Pericarp in Rice. Sweeney MT, Thomson MJ, Cho YG, Park YJ, Williamson SH, et al. PLoS Genetics Vol. 3, No. 8.)) looking at how the red pericarp of wild rice became the white pericarp of cultivated rice. The answer is that a mutation arose in the japonica subspecies, crossed to the indica and became fixed in both under very strong selection pressure by ancient rice farmers. They must have really liked those funny mutant white grains when they first noticed them! Oh to have been a fly on the wall — or a brown plant hopper on the rice stalk — when the white pericarp mutation was first noticed in some ancient paddy…

Then comes news that the three CGIAR centres with an interest in rice — IRRI, WARDA and CIAT — are to boost their collaboration to solve the pressing production problems of Africa. There’s talk of forming a consortium. More flags being prepared.

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Mapping agricultural biodiversity et al.

The new Information Development is out and it is a special issue on “GIS and Spatial Information for Rural Development.” You can read the abstracts of papers on, among other things:

  1. generating detailed crop distribution maps for sub-Saharan Africa from much coarser input data  ((You, Liangzhi; Wood, Stanley; Wood-Sichra, Ulrike; Chamberlin, Jordan. Generating plausible crop distribution maps for sub-Saharan Africa using a spatial allocation model. Information Development 2007 23: 151-159))
  2. “An Atlas of the Ethiopian Rural Economy” ((Chamberlin, Jordan; Tadesse, Mulugeta; Benson, Todd; Zakaria, Samia. An Atlas of the Ethiopian Rural Economy: expanding the range of available information for development planning. Information Development 2007 23: 181-192))
  3. a “Socio-Economic Atlas of Vietnam” ((Epprecht, Michael; Heinimann, Andreas; Minot, Nicholas; Muller, Daniel; Robinson, Tim. From Statistical Data to Spatial Knowledge — informing decision-making in Vietnam. Information Development 2007 23: 193-204)) 

This last is actually online, and well worth having a look at, although it is pretty huge to download.

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China to protect biodiversity

China’s new National Strategy for Plant Conservation has just been launched, and Botanic Gardens Conservation International (BGCI) has a write-up about it. An introduction to the strategy is also available. Agricultural biodiversity gets quite a high profile, which is great, and unusual for such exercises. Here’s a few quotes to give you the flavour:

China is home to some of the world’s most important crop, medicinal and ornamental species, such as tea, rice, soy beans, ginseng, magnolias, camellias & peaches.

China is … keen to investigate novel methods of ‘eco-agriculture’, in a bid to introduce more sustainable land management practices to a country which is still largely agricultural.

The system known as the “3R Model” (Resources, Research, and Resolution) has recently produced a unique golden-fleshed kiwi fruit, bred from wild native kiwi vines that were conserved by the project.

A national Chinese seed bank (containing 340,000 accessions) and a network of regional seed banks ensures the long-term conservation of the genes of important crops, such as rice and soya beans.

Over 11,000 species are used in traditional Chinese medicine. Of the 600 plant species that are regularly used, sustainable cultivation systems have been developed for 200 species, thereby preventing their unsustainable harvesting from the wild.

One thing I didn’t understand, though. There’s a picture of a cultivated field in the introduction to the strategy, and also in the BGCI piece, with the following caption:

Fields of cultivated ‘wild’ barley, found only in the Chinese Himalayas, demonstrate the importance of local and ethnic crop varieties.

No doubt there are wild species of Hordeum in the Chinese Himalayas. But what does it mean to say that they are cultivated? Similarly, there is cultivated barley there. But what does it mean to say that it is “wild”?