Category: Wild relatives

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Crop wild relatives in the spotlight

The International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture will be holding the 3rd session of its Governing Body in Tunis next week. If you’re going, let us have your impressions, please.

And watch out for the side event on “Securing Crop Wild Relative Conservation: Lessons Learned from Global Partnership,” organised by Bioversity International and the Food and Agriculture Organization, which will take place in the Salle Carthage 3 of the Hotel Barcelo Carthage Thalasso on 3 June at 18:00. Soft drinks and snacks will be served, I’m reliably informed by our friend Danny, who will be there making sure that order and decorum is maintained.

The side event will highlight the critical importance of crop wild relatives to global food security and the urgency of taking action to ensure their conservation, especially in the context of climate change. The experiences and outputs of the UNEP/GEF supported project, aimed at enhancing conservation and utilization of crop wild relatives, will be described, including the development of national and global information systems and national in situ conservation strategies.

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Berry genebank the pride of Oregon

There’s a lengthy article in Portland Monthly on the National Clonal Germplasm Repository at Corvallis, a unit within the United States Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service (USDA/ARS). It focuses on a couple of the people working there in particular, for example strawberry expert Kim Hummer:

Inside one of these greenhouses, diffused winter light streams through the glass ceiling, illuminating horticulturalist Kim Hummer and her colleagues as they hover over a small potted strawberry plant that, considering its history-steeped neighbors, appears undeserving of so much attention. Devoid of fruit, the plant’s heart-shaped leaves are edged brown, its runner pale red. It doesn’t look much different than any one of the other hundreds of strawberry plants crowding dozens of long tables. Yet Hummer’s voice brims with excitement. “This is a wild decaploid,” she says. “It’s very special.”

Want to know the species, which comes from the side of a volcano on Russia’s Iturup Island? Read the whole thing. There’s a lot, lot more.

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The call of the wild

Not sure how long they’ve been available, but I’ve just learned that the new versions of the Last of the Wild maps are out. The first version is a few years old now.

The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) and the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) at Columbia University have joined together to systematically map and measure the human influence on the Earth’s land surface today. The Last of The Wild, Version Two depicts human influence on terrestrial ecosystems using data sets compiled on or around 2000.

These are Europe’s most untouched areas:
europe

Not much left. There are also global and continental maps of human footprint and human influence index, although I must say I haven’t fully digested the difference between the two. And you can download the data and play around with it yourself, of course. Let the mashing begin!

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CWR heaven

So you’re on holiday at a villa in Western Crete; blue skies, bluer seas, wildflowers, olive groves and fish so fresh it practically flaps its way onto your plate. But it isn’t enough. And before you arrived, your blogging compadre told you that a few kilometres down the coast was a micro-reserve dedicated to the conservation of Phoenix theophrasti, right at the western edge of its distribution.

“Hey,” you announce gaily. “Let’s go see the wild date palms a few kilometres down the coast.”

Jaws drop, sniggers are suppressed, knowing glances exchanged. Agricultural biodiversity has reared its ugly head, on holiday no less. ((And be warned; there’s more “what I did on my holidays” nonsense to come.))

Eventually, one of the company asks the dreaded question.

“Why?”

So you go into blather mode. Crop wild relatives. Narrow genetic resources. Problems of cultivated date palms. (What was the name of that disease that’s killing Deglat Nour?) Breeding cycles. Climate change. Are date seeds recalcitrant? Vital importance for the entire future of the whole of the Middle East and North Africa. Blather, blather, blather.

And they buy it, yes! To humour you, but still. So off you wend along narrow, beautiful mountain roads, detouring for three hours to get a flat tire fixed. And there in the car park of the taverna where you stopped for coffee, locally-grown papaya and raki — at 11.30 in the morning — while the puncture was being mended, is a sign about the micro-reserve for Phoenix theophrasti, which enumerates the threats, outlines the responses and acknowledges the sponsors, but fails to answer the “why?” question.

Refreshed, on you wend, past the monastery of the golden step, through olive groves sheltering biblical flocks of sheep in their shade and down a stony incline. Confusingly, a couple of houses boast tame date palms, and you’re forced to admit that those are not why we came.

Suddenly, there you are. An honest-to-God turquoise lagoon fringed by lunar volcanic rock that has remarkably sharp edges. A sign and, you have to admit, some pretty ragged looking specimens that are clearly very like date palms.

Off you scamper to document the find and alert your colleague. Snap, snap, snap.

Carob trees. Wild thyme alive with bees. Spininess abounds. CWR heaven.

You return to the company, which has also been scampering, documenting, and paddling in the lagoon.

“This is heaven,” says one.

You breathe a quiet sigh of relief.