Category: Wild relatives

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Mapping Australian biodiversity

I finally got around to having a go at the Atlas of Living Australia. Very nice. You can make, and download images of, pretty maps of species distributions, Glycine in this case.

And you can mash that up with lots of different environmental layers, such as protected areas, as below.

There are nifty spatial analysis tools built in, to help you predict species distributions based on climate, for example, or explore the range of adaptation of a taxon. You can contribute to the data through citizen science projects. And much more. Well worth exploring.

What you can’t do — or at least I couldn’t find a way of doing it — is export the species distribution data to a kmz for use in Google Earth. Something I’ve complained about before for other biodiversity portals. Maybe someone out there will tell us why that is. ((Ok, well, actually there’s another thing. It would be nice to be able to separate taxa by colour in the scattergrams. The one above shows the whole Glycine genus, but I’m sure the different species will cluster separately to some extent. And downloading the data doesn’t help, as for some reason taxon name didn’t come along with the environmental data. Teething problems?))

One final thing. It’s a great idea to feature a number of “themes” on the atlas website, to get people started. At the moment it is things like wattles, “iconic species” and ants. Why not crop wild relatives?

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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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Nibbles: SusAg WWF-style, Obesity, Innovation, African farmers, Cyanobacteria, Climate change experiment