Wild relatives

June 20, 2011

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.

June 19, 2011June 19, 2011

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.

June 18, 2011

Nibbles: Deforestation, Adaptation

Poverty doesn’t drive deforestation. Discuss using examples from Kenya and China.
Crop Science Society of America (CSSA) position statement on “Crop Adaptation to Climate Change.” Genebanks mentioned. Crop wild relatives mentioned. Information systems mentioned. One’s cup runneth over.

June 16, 2011June 16, 2011

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

See what WWF thinks will make agriculture sustainable.
Americans are dying younger. Obesity partly to blame.
Study shows how scientists can get farmers to innovate. And vice versa?
Iron-age beer in France. “Beer … might have resembled modern home brews.” Which might have created a nation of wine-drinkers.
Voice of America ♥ Nourishing the Planet. (African farmers also important.)
Bacteria in mosses on tree branches fertilize forest soils. How long before the whole thing is available in a packet?
Bioengineering the prairie. Together with, presumably, its crop wild relatives.

June 13, 2011June 13, 2011

Brainfood: Bean diversity, Rice domestication, Microbial interactions squared, Threat of extinction, Agroforestry, Species diversity

Population structure and genetic differentiation among the USDA common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) core collection. Subpopulations detected within usual Middle American and Andean genepools. The former was more diverse. Diversity was lower for domestication loci. One wonders whether game worth candle.
Artificial selection for a green revolution gene during japonica rice domestication. There’s nothing new under the sun. Fuller fills us in.
Positive plant microbial interactions in perennial ryegrass dairy pasture systems. Plant-microbe interactions can have significant positive impact on production of, and chemical inputs into and losses from, perennial ryegrass dairy pasture systems. Gotta love that agrobiodiversity.
Plant growth promoting potential of Pontibacter niistensis in cowpea (Vigna unguiculata (L.) Walp.). And another one. New bacterium from Western Ghats fertilizes soil and helps cowpea to grow.
Extinction risk and diversification are linked in a plant biodiversity hotspot. That would the Cape. Extinction threat (IUCN categories) is better explained by phylogeny than by human activity or plant traits. Go figure.
The framework tree species approach to conserve medicinal trees in Uganda. Sort of like artificial keystone species. Lots of other cool stuff in the same issue of Agroforestry Systems.
Use of topographic variability for assessing plant diversity in agricultural landscapes. By and large, more environmental variability means more plant diversity, in Switzerland. Maybe some crop wild relatives in there?