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.
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.
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?
Breathing life into research
We who are stuck at headquarters, trying to inject a little life into our organisation’s activities, envy the scientists whose activities they are. What adventures they must have! What people they must meet, whose lives they touch and whose lives touch them! What material they must be storing for their anecdotage! What stories they could tell!
Except that they can’t. Because they are researchers. Doing research.
It’s not that they don’t have the skills. Some of them can tell great stories over a Tusker, baridi sana, and many take wonderful photos and even videos. It’s that they don’t have time when they’re in the field, precisely because they are doing the activities we are trying so hard to breathe life into. And when they get back here, there’s more work to be done. But what if there’s someone tagging along whose de facto job is not to do the stuff but to record the stuff others are doing? You get a rich set of impressions that can really help to bring a project to life, often unintentionally.
Bioversity’s recent field visit to some of its nutrition research in Kenya benefitted from just such a presence, resulting in a fascinating report from “the unofficial video guy”. What’s so nice about it is the immediacy of the impressions. The people were welcoming and gracious. There’s something called “African rice” that is “split and processed” maize. Muù, a “strange fruit that tasted like bittersweet marzipan”. The bus breaking down across both lanes of the road home, giving everyone a chance to learn a grain grinding song, all caught on video.
This is not a plea for jolly outings. It is a plea to recognize two things. That much of the time researchers have more important things to do than think about how to gussy up their work for wider consumption. And that someone whose job it is to do such gussying may stand a better chance of bringing a body of work to life.
Nibbles: Tamil genebank, Econutrition, Sweet perception, Salmon, Texas culinary diversity, Amaranth, Nepal hermarium video, Restoration
- Provincial Indian university gets a genebank.
- Nutritionists go all ecological on us.
- But does that include taking into account human variation in taste perception? I’m betting no.
- The case against GM salmon.
- Going crazy in Austin’s market.
- Amaranth touted in Kenya. Sorghum and local millets unavailable for comment.
- Take a virtual trip around Nepal’s herbarium.
- Society for Ecological Restoration opens online Early Registration for the 4th World Conference on Ecological Restoration, to be held in August in Mérida, Mexico. You guys need a blogger?