Category: Threats

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Fire threatens wild gourd…or maybe not

I’m ashamed to say that all Seminole names look alike to me. I know it’s a failing, and I’m trying to correct it. But, in the meantime, I could not help but be somewhat alarmed when I saw that a brush fire had destroyed a chunk of Okaloacoochee State Forest in Florida. That’s because I vaguely remembered a wild Cucurbita, endemic to Florida, with a very similar specific epithet. Well, it turned out to be an object lesson in the perils, and occasional advantages, of ignorance.

The wild cucurbit is actually Cucurbita okeechobeensis. And that’s the perils part, as “okeechobee” is actually not much like “okaloacoochee.” Pretty embarassing to confuse the two. But gbiffing Cucurbita okeechobeensis, and comparing its distribution with the location of Okaloacoochee State Forest, reveals the advantages part. For it turns out that Okeechobee gourd could well be found in or around the ravaged state forest (blue dots). It’s possible, anyway.

So a little learning can be a useful thing.

Now, I have no idea whether that brush fire actually destroyed, or even threatened, populations of this particular crop wild relative. Maybe someone will tell me. But the point I would like to make is that it would be nice to have a system whereby the locations of threats like fires, floods, new roads etc. could be automatically compared to a dataset of the distribution of crop wild relatives. Globally.

I don’t think technology is a problem. I did the whole thing in Google Earth. The bottleneck is a comprehensive global dataset of the locations (actual or predicted) of populations of crop wild relatives. Hopefully that’s what the CWR Portal will become in time.

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Nibbles: Bananas, Cassava, Coconuts, Potato, Training, Wild poultry, EU regulations, Saving seeds

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Nibbles: Restoration, Dates, Plant health, IRRI, Infrastructure, Agri-tourism, Food sovereignty

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Nibbles: Migration, Micronutrients, Taste, Kava, News, Data, Ozone, Chillis

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Prince buys apples

Regular readers will remember last year’s flap over the UK’s National Fruit Collection, which is looked after by the Brogdale Horticultural Trust and managed by the University of Reading at Brogdale, Kent. I won’t rehearse the details again, but suffice to say there was some doubt about the collection’s future. There’s now news from the Daily Telegraph that the collection has been “saved” by the Prince of Wales:

…three separate collections of the 1,000 most important breeds have been sold to the Prince of Wales, the Co-operative supermarket group and an anonymous Scottish businessman. 1 Each will plant their saplings in different parts of the country.

There’s not much more detail than that in the article, and of course we’ll work our contacts to try to find out more, and indeed to verify the accuracy of the newspaper accounts. But there are a couple of points about this statement that are a little worrying. At the very least, the whole thing raises a lot of interesting questions.

Let me start by saying that it’s certainly a good idea to safety duplicate (or triplicate in this case) germplasm collections in different places, especially field collections, which are particularly prone to accident and mishap. 2 But how exactly were the thousand accessions chosen? There are 2,300 apple varieties in the collection. How does one measure the “importance” of each of these? One measure might be how much they’ve been used, either directly in plantations or in breeding. But wouldn’t such varieties be the ones in least need of conservation? It would be good to know what criteria were used to make the selection.

My second worry is over the fact that the germplasm has been “sold.” For how much, exactly? And how was the amount calculated? And what does that mean about access to that material by potential users, either in the UK or overseas? 3 Apple is on Annex 1 of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture. Ex situ conserved Annex 1 material in the public domain and under the control of a Party to the Treaty, which the UK government is, is supposed to be made available to users under a “facilitated” access and benefit sharing regime. Does this privatization of part of the collection affect its status under the Treaty? If so, has the Treaty Secretariat been informed? It’s not as if the new owners won’t be trying making money out of it:

The Co-op intends to produce a “heritage apple juice” from some of the breeds by the end of this year. William Barnett, who heads up The Co-operative Farms’ 800-acre fruit-growing operation at Tillington in Herefordshire, where the apple trees are being planted, said: “Some of the apples date back to pre-Victorian times. They were originally dessert apples, but became less fashionable and failed as modern commercial varieties.”

What if someone else wants to try the same thing? Under what conditions will they have access to the material?

As I say, lots of questions. If anyone out there has the answers, we’d love to hear from you.