Category: Tourism

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Picking a good agrobiodiversity beach

My apologies to Robert Hijmans, the developer of DIVA-GIS. I had forgotten how awsomely awesome his software. It was really only the work of half an hour to export a shapefile of the distribution of wild and weedy accessions from Genesys, open it in DIVA-GIS, produce a gridfile of taxon richness, export it as a KMZ, and open it in Google Earth, together with The Guardian’s European bathing places dataset, which I had prepared earlier.

A beach called La Figueirette at Theoule-sur-Mer is right in the middle of that (relative) hotspot of species richness not far from the Italian border shown in light orange on the map above. And the beach doesn’t look too bad either, at least on StreetView.

Now, to check out the lakes…

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Making the best of your European beach holiday

So you’re thinking of going on a beach holiday to the south of France. But you’re not sure where exactly. You juggle a thousand variable. Texture of sand. Colour of sea. Number of stars of hotel. Density of restaurants. Average price of wine in the surroundings. You know the kind of thing. A nightmare. But you’re also interested in crop wild relatives. Maybe you can get in some botanizing? Isn’t that the most important thing? Well, if so, help is at hand. Download The Guardian’s handy database of Swimming in Europe. Mash it up with GBIF data on wild Brassica, say. Voilá, pick your beach.

Well, it’s nice and everything, but hardly ideal. What you’d really like in choosing your beach is some idea of species richness, preferably in multiple genepools. GBIF won’t do that, so I suppose one would have to walk the occurrence data through DIVA-GIS, and then export the species richness grid as a shapefile and import that into Google Earth. Except that you need the Pro version for that, and my very precious grant from Google has just expired. But stay tuned. Don’t book anything yet. Working on it.

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Mujib Nature Reserve has interesting plants too

So the Mujib Nature Reserve, “Jordan’s jewel of eco-tourism,” is poised to be promoted to UNESCO Biosphere Reserve. There have been ethnopharmacological studies of the flora of the site, which has even been used to “test models to improve the conservation of medicinal and herbal plants and the livelihood of rural communities through the management, and sustainable use of medicinal and herbal (M/H) plants for human and livestock needs.” And the flora baseline survey for the reserve is listed in Jordan’s monitoring system for implementation of the Global Plan of Action on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture as being part of the country’s efforts to “promote in situ conservation of crop wild relatives.” Wonderful. But I got all that by googling. Why is not more made of the plants on the page devoted to the reserve on the website of Jordan’s Royal Society for the Conservation of Nature, along with the Long-legged Buzzard and the Eurasian Badger? And yes, that’s a rhetorical question.

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Andean products on display

The Fifth Potato Festival is underway in the Surco district of Lima, Peru. It sounds like fun, but all the information about it online at the moment is in Spanish only. If you don’t read the language, and can’t be bothered fighting with the results of Google Translate, you can read a short piece on last year’s event in English. It’s actually about much more than just the potato. There are stands on a whole range of new Andean products:

…black quinoa, royal quinoa, red quinoa, quinoa sajama, maca, instant amaranth, instant cañihua, wheat, red corn, corn chullpi, bean mashco, barley mashco, black potato, white potato flour, etc.

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

There’s a really bad fire spreading in Arizona. ((NASA Earth Observatory image created by Jesse Allen, using data provided courtesy of the University of Wisconsin’s Space Science and Engineering Center MODIS Direct Broadcast system. Caption by Holli Riebeek.))

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. ((And can I take this opportunity of thanking Google for the Google Earth license?)) 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?