Threats

June 10, 2011June 20, 2011

Wallow Fire (may) threaten (some) wild beans. Maybe.

There’s a really bad fire spreading in Arizona. ¹

You can donwload all kinds of stuff about it, and even post your experiences of it on Facebook. But can you find out whether any crop wild relatives are threatened by it? Well, sure: all you have to do is go off to GBIF, and choose a likely genus (Phaseolus, say), and download the records, and mash them up in Google Earth with the latest fire perimeter data or whatever. ² Like I’ve done here:

Coming in closer, and using the NASA GeoTIFF instead of the normal Google Earth imagery, you can put yourself in the position of being able to make some reasonably intelligent guesses about what might be happening to some of these populations, and the genepool as a whole in the area:

But what I really meant is that there ought to be a way to do this automagically, or something. Anyway, it is sobering to reflect that while all hell is breaking loose in Arizona, not that far away to the northeast, in the peaceful surroundings of the Denver Botanical Garden, Anasazi beans are enjoying their day in the sun, utterly oblivious of the mortal threat faced by some of their wild cousins. It’s a cruel world. And there’s a point in all this about the need for complementary conservation strategies that’s just waiting to be made. Isn’t there?

June 8, 2011June 8, 2011

Nibbles: Royal genebank, Fish collection, Plant health, USDA wheat breeding project, Afghanistan, Breadfruit Art, Pests and Diseases, Idaho, Plant breeding, Gates, Panax quinquefolius, Natives

Thai king has crop genebank on palace grounds.
Fish in jars.
Planning Plant Clinics.
Plant Breeding for Drought Stress: The Project.
Wait, the Nebraska National Guard has an agribusiness development team? Maybe they should talk to the people responsible for the previous bullet point?
Kids! (And adults!) An Art Contest to celebrate ‘Ulu. Breadfruit, that is.
Use of Agrobiodiversity for Pest and Disease Management. A slide show from Carlo Fadda at Bioversity.
3rd Annual Biodiversity Working for Farmers Tour in Idaho. 23rd June, you have been warned.
Huge New York Times story on plant breeding and climate change.
Bill Gates hails creativity for small farmers challenge.
American ginseng: use it or lose it.
Do you live in Ann Arbour? Do you want native plants for your garden? Yeah but how about American ginseng?

June 7, 2011June 7, 2011

Nibbles: ITPGRFA, Hotspots, Adaptation, Agrobiodiversity, Potatoes and climate change, Cowpeas and drought, Apios, Tree planting, Fairtrade, Egyptian archaeobotany, Bolivian video

All about the International Treaty on PGRFA.
More, much more, on that climate change hotspots study.
IDRC on climate change adaptation in Africa. Almost nothing on agricultural diversity as a coping mechanism.
Unlike this.
Or this, for that matter. Never knew the Basque country was such a hotbed of potato research.
Or…oh forget it.
What, in the name of all that is happy, is hopniss?
Danone buys some goodwill.
Fairtrade chocolate: this looks like it should be really important. Is it?
So, you say you want to know what plant remains were found in the baskets in Tutankhamun’s tomb?
Bolivian agricultural biodiversity, anyone?

June 6, 2011June 3, 2011

Brainfood: Baby’s veggies, Chickpea and drought, Vine cactus breeding, Paleolithic rabbits, California protected areas, Wild pigeonpea, Pecorino classification, Milk composition, Phenotyping, Wild peas

Vegetables by Stealth: an exploratory study investigating the introduction of vegetables in the weaning period. Sneaking them into the diet is the most common strategy used by mothers to introduce their kids to vegetables. Reeeeeally?
Assessment of Iranian chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) germplasms for drought tolerance. Four out of 150 local landraces showed promise. It really is a numbers game, isn’t it?
In situ induction of chromosome doubling in vine cacti (Cactaceae). Potentially valuable autopolyploids were produced. Not that it was easy or anything.
Who brought in the rabbits? Taphonomical analysis of Mousterian and Solutrean leporid accumulations from Gruta Do Caldeirão (Tomar, Portugal). People did, that’s who, but only during the later Upper Paleolithic. Before that it was mainly owls.
Protected areas in climate space: What will the future bring? Nothing good. Both novel and disappearing climates are over-represented in current protected areas, at least in California.
Progress in the utilization of Cajanus platycarpus (Benth.) Maesen in pigeonpea improvement. Baby steps.
Classification of pecorino cheeses using electronic nose combined with artificial neural network and comparison with GC-MS analysis of volatile compounds. Wait, there are different kinds of pecorino?
The need for country specific composition data on milk. Well, you’ve got me convinced.
Rate-distortion tradeoff to optimize high-throughput phenotyping systems. Application to X-ray images of seeds. So, let me get this straight, basically, gauging the optimal trade-off between speed and accuracy in high-throughput phenotyping systems depends on what you’re measuring? Who writes these grant applications?
Experimental growing of wild pea in Israel and its bearing on Near Eastern plant domestication. First pea growers were either very patient or very quick workers.

June 6, 2011June 6, 2011

The revenge of characterization data

It is a truth universally acknowledged that characterization data are useless to breeders. Well, universally acknowledged by breeders anyway. Morphological data are all well and good for genebank curators looking for duplicates and old-fashioned taxonomists, they say. But what we need is evaluation data, and lots of it.

As usual, I exaggerate; for effect, as usual. But I think it would certainly be true to say that detailed morphological descriptions of germplasm are not the highest priority thing breeders want out of genetic resources databases. That would probably be information on resistance to biotic and abiotic stresses.

And yet a paper just out in Euphytica shows that the former can be clues to the latter. A team at IRRI ³ looked at the susceptibility of rice to sheath blight, an important disease throughout rice-growing areas, especially under intensive systems. ⁴ They measured how 200 accessions did when inoculated with Rhizoctonia solani in the field. So far, so conventional.

But because the accessions were very carefully chosen (out of a total of over 100,000 in the IRRI genebank), the team, which included the genebank manager, were able to estimate to what extent differences in disease intensity were due to plant and canopy architecture — in other words, morphology — and how much to genetic susceptibility.

The accessions tested were selected to represent contrasting morphologies (based on leaf length, leaf angle and number of tillers, typical characterization descriptors), different phenologies (number of days to 80% flowering) and all the major varietal groups (indica, aus, aromatic, temperate, japonica and tropical japonica). It turned out that the lowest levels of disease intensity were found on a particular morpho-phenological group, and that this effect of morphology on disease intensity was much greater than any effect of genetic group, although the aus varietal group was markedly superior to the others.

The authors therefore recommend that breeders looking for sources of reduced susceptibility to sheath blight will find it most efficient to select taller accessions with wider leaves. Let us see what the breeders think. I’ll post this on GIPB and report back if there’s any reaction.