Just in time for the big meeting on Biodiversity and Sustainable Diets, opening today at FAO in Rome and part organized by our pal Jess, comes shocking news:
Of 502 sample plants, only 36 followed best practice for plant identification, and 37 followed best practice for plant nomenclature. Overall, 27% of sample plants were listed with names that are not in current use, or are incorrectly spelt, or both. Only 159 sample plants would have been found from a database search of citations and abstracts. Considering the need for food composition data from wild and locally cultivated food species, and the cost of analysis, researchers must identify, name and publish species correctly. Drawing on the fields of ethnobotany and ethnopharmacology, comprehensive recommendations are given for best practice.
Mark Nesbitt and his colleagues analyzed the quality of botanical information in published papers about the nutritional value of plant foods. ((Nesbitt, M., McBurney, R., Broin, M., & Beentje, H. (2010). Linking biodiversity, food and nutrition: The importance of plant identification and nomenclature Journal of Food Composition and Analysis, 23 (6), 486-498 DOI: 10.1016/j.jfca.2009.03.001)) What they discovered was that in many cases, if you relied on the botanical names as given in the papers, you would be hard put to identify the species concerned accurately enough to use automated searches of databases. And that could be a real problem as researchers seek to build a case for the value of lesser-known wild and cultivated species in building sustainable and nutritious diets.
There are, of course, recommendations to remedy the problem: “best practice”. Whether they’ll be widely adopted is anyone’s guess.