Category: Wild relatives

Posted on

No little houses on this prairie

I promised you more on the Doolittle Prairie, and here it is. But first, thanks to Candy Gardner for arranging the visit, and to Mark Widrlechner for leading the tour.

Doolittle Prairie State Preserve, near Story City in Iowa, is a small remnant of native tallgrass prairie. The 26-acre state-owned protected area supports about 220 plant species. ((You can download a prairie species dataset from Dr Brian J Wisley’s webpage. Look among his publications for: Wilsey, B.J. Martin, L.M. and H.W. Polley. 2005a. Predicting plant extinction based on species-area curves in prairie fragments with high beta richness. Conservation Biology. 19:1835-1841.)) About half of the area, the northern part, has never been ploughed or grazed, though hay was cut until the 60s. The southern part has been grazed, and the southwest corner ploughed until 1965 and then replanted with seed from the northern section. All around are fields of maize and soybean. Management is by cutting and burning, to keep down exotics, and encroaching shrubs and trees.

me

It’s a very evocative place. You can just imagine the deer and the buffalo roaming on it back in the day. There are still deer. Buffalo, not so much. ((Though I did see buffalo nearby.)) It’s also pretty interesting from an agrobiodiversity perspective, because it’s got quite a number of crop wild relatives for such a small place.

A couple of species of wild sunflowers, for example. This one is Helianthus rigidus:

helianthus

There are also native species of Allium, Elymus, Lactuca, Fragaria, Prunus, Ribes, Rubus, and Vitis:

vitis

All in a beautifully colorful setting, at least at this time of the year.

general view

So, a bit of a CWR hotspot, in its own small way, and protected to boot. You may remember the recent global review of the role of protected areas in CWR conservation. I don’t think that CWR have been mapped in the US in the same way as has been done in Russia, however. ((They have, however, been inventoried. See Appendix A of the United States country report for the first State of the World Report. Thanks to Karen for the tip.)) Once you have geo-referenced CWR locations, you could easily mash the result up with the online map of protected areas to see which national parks and reserves contribute most to CWR conservation. Anybody out there working on this? I bet little Doolittle Prairie would be on that list.

rainbow

Posted on

Nibbles: Seed Conference, High carotenoid bananas, DIVA-GIS, Protected area map, Pulse domestication, Food policy, Torreya rewilding

Posted on

Thank you, Ames!

Just back from Heartland and, before the jetlag overpowers me, I really want to thank everyone at the North Central Regional Plant Introduction Station (NC7) in Ames, Iowa for their incredible hospitality over the past week. I know this will get to them because a couple of the people working at the station told me they visit us occasionally. Grateful for that too!

IMG_0172

The ARS facility at Ames is the oldest of the US plant introduction stations. It’s main crop is maize, of which it has a collection of about 20,000 accessions from all over the world.

IMG_0061

But there are also some 30,000 accessions of a bunch of other crops and wild species.

IMG_0055

Many of the crops require careful management of pollinators during regeneration and multiplication. Fortunately, there hasn’t been any colony collapse disorder among the beehives used and maintained on the station.

IMG_0090

Like many of the active genebanks of the USDA National Plant Germplasm System, the one at Ames benefits from an almost symbiotic relationship with nearby Iowa State University, with some staff also having university duties and many students gaining hands-on experience in the genebank.

IMG_0104

Also nearby is a fascinating prairie remnant, Doolittle Prairie, which houses about a dozen crop wild relatives. I’ll say a bit more about that in due course, but here’s what the place looks like at sunset.

IMG_0164

Thanks again to everyone at NC7!

Posted on

Silphium rediscovered?

Luigi dug up this great article — Devil’s Dung: The World’s Smelliest Spice — which reveals more about asafoetida than you could possibly ever have wanted to know. Lord but it is strange stuff to cook with, and yet I do like what it does for a dish. But I digress. Buried in a sidebar near the bottom of the page is a claim, complete with coy question mark, that silphium, most prized spice of ancient Rome, might be alive and well. The article recounts the history of silphium, and how it was believed to have gone extinct by the 1st century CE, so I won’t repeat that here. It also mentions the possibility that Cachrys ferulacea and ancient silphium are one and the same. ((GBIF doesn’t yet know about the record from Cyrenia.)) Personally, I have no idea, and I’m not even sure I know how one would know, but I’m intrigued. Thanks Luigi.

Posted on

Wild cassava genetics used to document past changes in vegetation

ResearchBlogging.orgWas southern French Guiana always forested, a refugium for forest species, or was it dominated by more open vegetation during drier, glacial times? A recent paper in Molecular Ecology tries to decide between these competing hypothesis, and the interesting thing for us at the Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog is that it does so through a genetic study of a crop wild relative. ((DUPUTIÉ, A., DELÊTRE, M., DE GRANVILLE, J., & MCKEY, D. (2009). Population genetics of Manihot esculenta ssp. flabellifolia gives insight into past distribution of xeric vegetation in a postulated forest refugium area in northern Amazonia. Molecular Ecology, 18 (13), 2897-2907. DOI: 10.1111/j.1365-294X.2009.04231.x.))

Manihot esculenta ssp. flabellifolia is the closest wild relative of cassava. It is “distributed on an arc partly encircling the Amazon basin, from eastern Bolivia and Peru eastward to northeastern Brazil, northward to the Guianas and then westward to Venezuela.” Its habitat is the transition zone between forest and cerrado in the south, and open environments such as savannas and rocky outcrops in the north. In French Guiana, which was the focus of the study, it is found both in the coastal strip, and on isolated granitic outcrops (inselbergs) in the forested south, with a large gap in between.

Seven microsatellite loci were used to investigate the genetic relationships among 14 populations, 4 from inselbergs and the rest from the coast. The results are pretty easily summarized. First, the inselberg populations were very similar to each other. Second, they were quite different as a group from the coastal populations. Finally, the coastal populations were highly differentiated among themselves.

So, what do these results tell us about the past vegetation history of the region? One conclusion was that the coastal populations (which incidentally, in contrast to the inselberg populations, showed some evidence of introgression from the crop) are relatively recent, and arrived from savannas to the west through a series of bottlenecks, rather than from the south. As for the southern inselberg populations, given the limited range of pollen and seed flow, they seem to be the remnants of a formerly more extensive, fairly homogeneous population. ((Conservation question: Does that mean that seed of the 4 inselberg populations could be bulked and kept as a single accession? Answers on a postcard, please.)) That suggests that southern French Guiana was drier and had a more open vegetation before the Late Glacial Maximum 10,000 years ago. There was probably a forest refugium in the central part of the country, but not in the south.

Assuming, of course, that the adaptation of the species hasn’t changed much along the way. It remains to be seen whether the same pattern will be found in other taxa. Perhaps other species of agrobiodiversity interest will be investigated in the same way.