Category: Wild relatives

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Wild rices in the Protected Area of the Week

Those happy few, that band of brothers, who follow us on Twitter will know that the Tropical Rainforest Heritage of Sumatra is IUCN’s Protected Area of the Week. It is actually three protected areas: the Gunung Leuser National Park, the Kerinci Seblat National Park and the Bukit Barisan Selatan National Park. Great for Indonesia’s largest mammals, apparently, and I asked the question in my tweet whether they are equally good for wild rices.

Quick as a flash, Nora Castaneda at CIAT produced a map of wild rice accessions from Sumatra, based on IRRI data. Turns out two accessions of Oryza officinalis have been collected from the Gunung Leuser National Park. That’s the northernmost of the three protected areas, shown in pink.

GIBF doesn’t add much, unfortunately. But there could well be a number of other wild rice relatives in these parks. That we don’t know, or at any rate that it is pretty difficult to find out, is really an indictment of the disconnect between the agrobiodiversity and nature conservation communities.

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Nibbles: Heirloom store, Leaf miners, Mongolian drought, GPS, Coca, Ag origins, Aquaculture, Lice, Bud break in US, IFAD livestock, biofuels, Pig history

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Nibbles: Quasi conservation, Prioritization, Nabhan, Wild sunflower in Argentina, Pests and diseases, Ethiopian honey, African beer, Ash, Camel milk, Livestock conference, Bull breeding, Goldman Environmental Prize, Anastasia

  • Another nail in the coffin of Cartesian dualism in conservation? Yeah, right. Oooooh, here’s another. What next? Conservation-vs-use to bite the dust?
  • Now here’s a thing. Priority setting in conservation for plants in Turkey and sheep in Ethiopia. Compare and contrast.
  • “Bad-ass eco warrior” quoted on … apples.
  • Invasive species can be good … when they are sunflower wild relatives.
  • Pests and diseases: “New solutions could include novel resistant cultivars with multiple resistance genes, suitable epigenetic imprints and improved defence responses that are induced by attack.” I’ll get right on that. And more from Food Security.
  • Rare Ethiopian honey becoming rarer.
  • Also rare are micro-breweries in Africa. Alas.
  • Volcano bad for British diet. And Kenyan jobs.
  • So let them drink camel milk!
  • Conference on Sustainable Animal Production in the Tropics. Doesn’t sound like much fun? It’s in Guadeloupe!
  • And, there will probably be photographs of bulls of “stunning scrotal circumference.” Convinced yet?
  • “Rios won for his work promoting a return to more traditional farming techniques focusing on seed diversity, crop rotation and the use of organic pest control and fertilizers to both increase crops and improve the communist-led island’s environment.”
  • Our friend Anastasia does Seed Magazine: “Until broader efforts to reduce poverty can take hold, crops with improved nutrients could be very important in reducing death and disease caused by nutrient deficiencies.”
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Nibbles: Aubergines, Opuntia, Amazonian ag, Kenya, Swiflets, Coconut and Web 2.0, PROTA, Mexico, Fruit wild relatives