Wild relatives

November 3, 2026November 3, 2026

A seed of doubt

Kew’s Millennium Seed Bank has soft-launched SeedPOD, the Seed Portal for Online Data, a platform intended to make information about native seed collections, their availability and their propagation easier to find. The ambition is to tackle one of the persistent bottlenecks in ecological restoration: getting the right seed, from the right source, to the right place.

It is an interesting development, and one that fits into a broader restoration workflow I explored in an earlier post on restoration and digital tools. There is another tool that could usefully complement it: the RHS Garden Climate Assessment Tool (GCAT).

The idea is to connect three stages of a practical restoration exercise. First, identify a native species appropriate to the planting location. Then find out whether seed is available from the Millennium Seed Bank or another seed supplier. Finally, check whether the species is likely to remain climatically suitable at the planting site under future climate scenarios. If all goes well, obtain the seed and grow the plants.

I decided to try this with Markhamia obtusifolia, an indigenous African tree that might be an interesting addition to my garden in Nairobi.

The first stop was SeedPOD. Here I found a bit of a discrepancy. The older Millennium Seed Bank seed list website listed three accessions: one from Malawi and two from Botswana. The new SeedPOD interface showed just one accession, held by IIAM (Instituto de Investigação Agrária de Moçambique) in Maputo, and apparently the only one currently available. It is not clear whether this reflects a change in the underlying holdings, a difference in what the two databases display, or simply a difference in how availability is recorded. Either way, it raises a question about how complete and up to date the new interface is.

There was a little more information from BGCI’s PlantSearch, accessible through SeedPOD, which identified 15 ex situ sites holding the species. That suggests that the tree is represented in a reasonable number of living collections, although it does not tell us whether any of them can supply seed. BTW, the links from SeedPOD to GBIF and Genesys did not work when I tried them, and I could not find the promised list of seed suppliers either. So the next step in the workflow — actually finding some seed — remains elusive. (ChatGPT could not find any seed suppliers in Nairobi though it did flag a couple of plausible options for M. lutea.)

At least the climate assessment was more straightforward. Using GCAT, I was able to establish that M. obtusifolia should be climatically suitable for planting in Nairobi under most climate change scenarios. This is a useful check, although it does not settle questions of soil, provenance, or other ecological requirements. Climate suitability is not quite the same thing as ecological suitability.

None of this diminishes the value of SeedPOD’s underlying ambition. Bringing together information previously dispersed information is worthwhile. But the real test is whether a user can move easily and quickly from a species name to a viable source of seed, assess its suitability for a particular restoration site, and eventually get plants into the ground.

My little experiment has not quite completed that journey. SeedPOD helped identify ex situ holdings, and GCAT provided a positive climate-suitability assessment. But the route from a database record to an actual packet of seed is still surprisingly difficult to navigate. A platform intended to connect seed conservation with ecological restoration will ultimately be judged not just by how much information it brings together, but by whether people can use it to get seed into the ground.

October 26, 2026October 24, 2026

Brainfood: Ancient Madagascar cattle, American bison, Tibetan yaks, Korean silkworms, European cattle genomic selection, Slovenian cattle footprint, Nigerian ponds, African swine fever in Asia

Past rapid spread of introduced livestock coincided with vegetation clearance on Madagascar. Ancient sheep, goat and cattle bones show livestock racing across the island about 1,200 years ago, in step with forest clearance and the loss of elephant birds and pygmy hippos. People had arrived long before, so hunting alone is an insufficient culprit. Also I can’t imagine pygmy hippos being all that nice to eat.
Paleogenomic insight into the collapse, recovery, and management of American bison. 115 ancient and 45 modern genomes show that past bison populations were widely connected, which means that today’s herds, while more fragmented, retain more diversity than was feared. Also, many modern bison lack the cattle ancestry long assumed to be ubiquitous, but wood bison do carry plains bison ancestry from 1920s translocations. So, swings and roundabouts.
Whole-genome resequencing reveals genetic diversity, population structure, and selection signatures in tibetan yak. Three recently recognised Xizang populations (Chawula, Jila and Niangya) prove genetically richer than many others and cluster with Yushu and wild yak. Selection signals turn up at coat colour genes such as MC1R and at candidates for meat production. Has anyone done selection signals in bison?
Selection of a phenotypic and functional core set for South Korean silkworm genetic resources, Bombyx mori (Lepidoptera: Bombycidae). A core set is distilled from a larger collection on multiple morphological, physiological and quality criteria, a manageable shortlist so the genebank’s holdings can be more easily used rather than merely admired. What would a core collection for the bison look like, I wonder?
Impact of genomic selection on genetic diversity in 5 local European cattle breeds. Genomic selection uses DNA information from across an animal’s genome to predict its breeding value, allowing breeders to select animals likely to pass desirable traits to their offspring earlier and more accurately than relying on observed characteristics or pedigree alone. But can it be bad for genetic diversity if applied to a small local breed? Well, it shortened sire generation intervals and evened out top-sire contributions, but inbreeding rose in two breeds and fell in three. Genetic management mattered more than genomic selection, so the lesson is to monitor, and adjust as needed. Possibly relevant to the bison?
Adoption of support tools for biodiversity conservation: a mixed-methods analysis of ecosystem services awareness among Slovenian cattle farmers. Livestock farmers who are younger and with more positive attitudes to biodiversity and the European Green Deal are more likely to adopt biodiversity-supporting practices. Knowing this could have saved many pigmy hippos 1,200 years ago in Madagascar.
A national fish pond dataset for Nigeria generated using automated detection and segmentation. A segmentation model run over imagery, with a Random Forest classifier filtering the candidates, yields an openly released map of aquaculture production that was previously hard to see, let alone manage.
Pathways to recover Asian wild pigs from African swine fever. Since 2018 the virus has caused huge mortality in naive wild pig populations, and the authors set out eight priority actions, with early-warning surveillance, captive breeding and emergency financing the ones that can’t wait. Free-ranging domestic pigs and thin biosecurity at the wildlife-livestock interface keep kind of bring us back to where we began on Madagascar.

October 21, 2026October 21, 2026

Nibbles: Standing variation, Indigenous dogs, Austrian apples, Jordanian olive oil, Island foods

Ancient farmers didn’t have to wait for the genetic diversity that made domestication possible. They selected from variation already present in wild plants, including the ancestors of rice and maize. Domestication was as much about spotting (or happening upon) useful differences as creating new ones.
English colonists in America called Indigenous dogs “wolves,” revealing as much about colonial perceptions as about the animals themselves. This history of Indigenous dogs shows how unfamiliar animals were classified through peculiarly European ideas about wildness.
Austria is bringing forgotten apple varieties back to life. Saving old varieties in genebanks is one thing: getting people to grow, sell and eat them is another, but it can be done. Or at least tried.
Jordan’s olive-oil heritage centres on traditional varieties such as Nabali and ancient Rumi trees, but most production is consumed locally, leaving exports limited and making provenance, cultivar and harvest date important indicators for buyers. Compare and contrast with Austrian apples.
Small island developing states have distinctive food cultures and ingredients, but face particular challenges in building sustainable and resilient food systems. FAO’s A Taste of SIDS explores the connections between island food, biodiversity and culinary heritage. Nice to see diversity within crops considered, though a few local variety names would have been nice.

October 19, 2026October 19, 2026

The gourd, the bred and the citrus

Jeremy’s latest newsletter includes a link to a piece on the domestication of cucurbits¹ that reminded him of a classic of evolutionary biology and reminded me that I meant to link to The Botanist in the Kitchen’s own autumnal foray into Halloween pumpkins et al. It also alerted me to what promises to be a phenomenal eight-part exploration of citrus diversity in Sicily by Erik Grouger.

October 19, 2026October 17, 2026

Brainfood: WorldCuP, Crop origins, Abrahamic plants, UK landraces double, Ex situ change, Santorini vineyards, Apulian olives

WorldCuP: A database of checklists documenting the World’s Cultivated Plants and their distributions. Cool new database records 1,444,325 occurrences representing 91,358 accepted cultivated plant species across 2,718 regions in 156 countries. Geographic coverage is extensive but uneven, with notable gaps in parts of Africa, southwest and central Asia, and Oceania. Most of the taxa recorded are not in existing major crop and useful-plant databases.
Integrating multiple disciplines to locate the origins of domestication of crops. Combining evidence from botany, biogeography, genetics, archaeology, linguistics, and history overturns the traditional Mesoamerican hypothesis for cacao origins, supporting domestication in western Amazonia, probably involving multiple events. Peach palm’s domestication is best placed in southwestern Amazonia. Cupuaçu remains unresolved. Now for the other 91,355 species.
Plant Species Mentioned in Abrahamic Scriptures: Implications for Biodiversity and Traditional Agriculture and Horticulture. Olive, grapevine and fig, together with cereals such as wheat and barley, occur prominently across the three scriptural traditions examined, while date palm is particularly prominent in the Qur’an. Not clear whether scriptures qualify as checklists.
Crop landrace conservation, status, challenges and motivations in Great Britain. A national inventory (checklist even) identifies 566 landrace populations maintained on farms by 197 growers, alongside 1,876 British-origin genebank accessions, representing a total of 1,201 distinct landraces. Cereal and vegetable landrace cultivation has gone up since 2004, but forage diversity is increasingly threatened. Climate change, labour shortages and lower yields are the main challenges reported by growers.
An inventory, threat and conservation assessment of UK wheat landrace diversity. The UK currently has 27 wheat landrace varieties growing on more than 700 hectares, an increase in both variety numbers and cultivated area since 2009. Interviews with 50 farmers identify insufficient market demand and limited seed availability as key constraints. So, not climate change, labour shortages and lower yields.
Strong differentiation between source and ex situ populations of rare plant species revealed by next-generation sequencing. Across four rare plant species, ex situ populations showed significant genetic differentiation from their wild sources despite only one generation in cultivation, while overall genetic diversity and inbreeding did not differ significantly. Unrepresentative seed collection, unconscious selection during propagation or genetic drift could explain the differences. Something to test on all those British landraces, labour permitting?
Rethinking the vineyard of Santorini in a changing climate and preserving an historic wine region. Recommends a staged transition from vineyard recovery to ecological regeneration, prioritising soil organic matter, drought management and indigenous grapevine diversity. Sounds like lots of labour will be needed.
Conservation dilemmas: Xylella fastidiosa and the future(s) of olive farming. In Puglia, disease management is pushing olive farming towards competing futures: intensive, mechanised production vs the preservation of ancient trees as cultural landscapes. The fate of traditional groves depends less on technical disease solutions than on whether markets, subsidies and labour arrangements make their continued care economically viable. Well that doesn’t sound promising. Maybe try prayer?