- Sustainable fashion, darling.
- “The world’s leading international researchers will review the history of climate change, appraise the current state of the science and identify adaptations for the future.” It says here.
- Fiji suddenly discovers yams.
- Genebank romance in Durango. Well, that felt good.
- Animal Genetic Resources vol 8 is out.
- Locavores go crazy on Guam.
- Cocoa origins celebrated. And why not?
- Seems like every few months there’s something else on how those southern Iraq marshes are being brought back to life. But what I really want to know, and nobody is saying, is if there are any crop wild relatives there.
Important Plant Areas documented
More than 200 areas across North Africa and the Middle East have been identified as wild plant hotspots, a report has revealed. The research lists 207 places which are internationally important for the plants they contain, including 33 in Syria, 20 in Lebanon, 20 in Egypt, 21 in Algeria, 13 in Tunisia and five in Libya.
The report in question is “Important Plant Areas of the south and east Mediterranean region,” ((Radford, E.A., Catullo, G. and Montmollin, B. de. (eds.) (2011). Important Plant Areas of the south and east Mediterranean region: priority sites for conservation. IUCN, Gland, Switzerland and Malaga, Spain. Gland, Switzerland and Malaga, Spain: IUCN. VIII + 108 pp.)) just out thanks to IUCN, Plantlife International and WWF, and downloadable for free. The maps are nice, of course, and I hope they’ll be available in digital form in due course, if they are not already. ((I’ll have a look around when I have a minute.)) And it is also great to see a list of species with restricted ranges; it includes quite a few crop wild relatives, in particular Allium and Vicia spp.
Brainfood: Cabbages, Crops in Darfur, Sowing dates, People and biodiversity, Honeybees, Rhizobium, Figs, Urban ag, Wild olives, Ancient textiles, Ducks, Wheat introgression, Food citizenship, Crop models, Trifolium, Variety choice
- Genetic diversity of Brassica oleracea var. capitata gene bank accessions assessed by AFLP. Czech genebank; subgroups reflected place of origin.
- Optimizing the cropping mix in North Darfur State, Sudan. A study of Umkdada district. “…the results of the model were different from the real practices of the farmers.” Oh dear. To improve the fit, schoolboys should work in the fields more. And crops should fetch more. The dismal science indeed.
- Climate-driven simulation of global crop sowing dates. Ok, this model works. You can predict sowing dates under rainfed conditions for various annual crops from climatic conditions. Not entirely sure why you would want to, though.
- Exploring some of the myths of land use change: Can rural to urban migration drive declines in biodiversity? Yes, counter-intuitively, at least in the forests of Mexico’s southwestern highlands. More from Conservation Magazine.
- Pollination services in the UK: How important are honeybees? Quite a bit, but maybe not as much as previously thought. It’s the wild bees, stupid!
- Genetic diversity and symbiotic effectiveness of rhizobia isolated from root nodules of Phaseolus vulgaris L. grown in soils of Iran. It is high, and it varies, respectively.
- Interspecific hybridization of fig (Ficus carica L.) and Ficus erecta Thunb., a source of Ceratocystis canker resistance. It’s a breakthrough!
- Exploring the diversity of urban and peri-urban agricultural systems in Sudano-Sahelian West Africa: An attempt towards a regional typology. There are 6 types. Not 5; not 7. On this one, the journey is more interesting than the destination.
- Variability of wild olives (Olea europaea subsp. europaea var. sylvestris) analyzed by agro-morphological traits and SSR markers. There’s a lot of variabzzzzzzzzzz…
- Hemp in ancient rope and fabric from the Christmas Cave in Israel: Talmudic background and DNA sequence identification. Mainly flax, but some hemp, from both Roman and Chalcolithic periods. But can you smoke it?
- Modelling the distribution of domestic ducks in Monsoon Asia. Low resolution data, plus fancy modelling, can be used to get pretty good high resolution predictions.
- Gene flow between wheat and wild relatives: empirical evidence from Aegilops geniculata, Ae. neglecta and Ae. triuncialis. It happens, a lot.
- Toward food system sustainability through school food system change: Think&EatGreen@School and the making of a community-university research alliance. Food citizenship?
- Simulation of winter wheat yield and its variability in different climates of Europe: A comparison of eight crop growth models. Big differences among models, so best thing to do is to use the mean of all of them.
- The potential of plant viruses to promote genotypic diversity via genotype × environment interactions. The negative effect of White Clover Mosaic Virus (WCMV) infection on performance differs from white clover genotype to genotypes, which means differential selection, which means negative frequency-dependent selection in host populations, which means diversity. Via.
- Amplifying the benefits of agroecology by using the right cultivars. Why should we summarize, when an author has already done so?
The pleasures and frustrations of combining biodiversity data
This website provides information on recommended locations, mainly in protected areas, suited for the establishment of genetic reserves for Avena, Beta, Brassica and Prunus targeted crop wild relative taxa across Europe, in the context of the AEGRO project. Available information includes ecogeographical data as well as an inventory of crop wild relatives belonging to the four target genera occurring at each location.
This is the map of the recommended sites:
Which is great, and even greater is the fact that you can look at individual species, and the suggested protected areas, using a nifty Google Maps plugin. This, for example, is the Estrecho site in southern Spain, which is where you find an endemic wild oat (among other things).
The problem is ((You knew there was a problem, didn’t you?)) that I can find no way of mashing these data up with anything else. For example, say you want to add Genesys data to see if any other species occur in this, or any other, protected area. I don’t see how. You know where those Genesys accessions are:
But there’s no way to combine the two. Or maybe you want to see if the area was affected by fires last summer. Can’t be done. You know where the fires occurred:
But there’s no way to combine the two. Whereas of course you can easily combine that NASA fire data with the Genesys data, simply by bringing both into Google Earth. ((And, yet again, thanks to Google for the Pro license. So cool.))
So I guess my plea is: if you’re going to use Google Maps or Google Earth to display your biodiversity data, please also make it downloadable. Maybe there was a reason why this couldn’t be done in this project. I’m all ears.
Oh, and there’s another thing while I’m indulging my hobbyhorses. Can’t we use some innovative approaches to add to these kinds of datasets? I mean, if it can be done for amphibians…
Collecting germplasm in the Iraqi desert
You may remember the story of Mrs Sanaa Abdul Wahab Al-Sheikh of the Iraqi genebank. Well, she’s still collecting away, most recently in the deserts of southern Iraq. Here are a couple of the photographs she recently sent me.
