Category: Wild relatives

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A date with wild dates

A friend is going to Crete for his holidays, so I naturally suggested that he visit the populations of the wild relative of the date palm, Phoenix theophrasti, which is rare, endangered and sort-of endemic to the island. Actually there are apparently some populations in southern Turkey too, but I didn’t know that at the time. Ok, but where exactly do I find it, he asked? Give me lat/longs.

Well, I’m not sure if I managed that, but after a certain amount of googling I happened across what seems to be the mother lode of P. theophrasti information. And all conveniently packaged in a pdf pamphlet. It’s been produced as part of an intriguing project called “CRETAPLANT: A Pilot Network of Plant Micro-Reserves in Western Crete.” Great that one of the plants/habitats being targeted is a crop wild relative. Coincidentally, the genome of the crop itself has just been sequenced.

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Mapping Ugandan wetlands to protect them

Want to know where Ugandans can make the most money from harvesting papyrus? Here you go:

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This map is one of a whole series on Ugandan wetlands — their potential and the threats they face — that has just been published by the World Resources Institute ((In collaboration with Uganda’s Wetlands Management Department, the Uganda Bureau of Statistics, and the International Livestock Research Institute.)) under the title Mapping a Better Future: How Spatial Analysis Can Benefit Wetlands and Reduce Poverty in Uganda.

One of the co-authors, Paul Mafabi , commissioner of the Wetlands Management Department in Uganda’s Ministry of Water and Environment, had this to say at the launch:

These maps and analysis enable us to identify and place an economic value on the nation’s wetlands. They show where wetland management can have the greatest impacts on reducing poverty.

There are probably some wild rice relatives lurking in these wetlands too, let’s not forget.

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A new use for tubers

A sharp knife is an essential element in the preparation of many vegetables, a fact as true 2 million years ago as it is today. Results from the recent meeting of the Paleoanthropology Society, reported in Science, indicate that the people who occupied the site of Kanjera South in Kenya carried stones that held an edge better from at least 13 kilometres away. Thomas Plummer of Queens College in New York and David Braun of the University of Cape Town found that a third of the stone tools at Kanjera came from elsewhere, and that these stones made longer-lasting knives than local material.

What were they using the knives for? To butcher animals, obviously, but also to cut grass and to process wild tubers. Cristina Lemorini of La Sapienza university here in Rome showed that the pattern of wear on the ancient tools matched the wear on modern stone tools used by the Hadza people of Tanzania to process plant material. In particular, using the stone knives to cut the underground storage tubers of wild plants left a pattern of grooves and scratches that was identical on modern and two-million year old stones.

Why tubers? There have been lots of theories about the role of plant tubers in the evolution of humanity, most of which hinge on the energy to be obtained from tubers, especially when times are hard. Margaret Schoeninger, of the University of California, San Diego, floated an intriguing new idea at the meeting. She noted that most of the tubers provide scant energy, and that modern Hadza chew on slices of tuber but don’t swallow the fibrous quid. Measurements show that panjuko (Ipomoea transvaalensis) and makaritako ((Would you believe not a single instance in Google, apart from a reference to a 2001 paper by Schoeninger? At least until after today. Insert obligatory rant about common names without binomials here. And if you have a binomial, please share it, for those who come after us)) can be up to 80% water. Schoeninger thinks that early humans used the tubers as portable canteens.

That might raise the question: why weren’t they domesticated? That’s an unanswerable hypothetical, but the simple answer might be that there was just no need to.

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Botanical garden database heaven

An email alert from the good folks at Botanical Gardens Conservation International (BCGI) tells me they have spruced up their website. And the website in turns reminds me that May 18th is Plant Conservation Day, and we should probably do something about that here.

But the main reason for the alert is to draw our attention to two online databases: PlantSearch and GardenSearch.

PlantSearch enables users to locate rare or threatened plant species in cultivation around the world. This database is compiled from lists of living collections submitted to BGCI by the world’s botanic gardens. The database presently includes over 575,000 records representing almost 180,000 taxa from 692 gardens.

And you can find a garden anywhere in the world using GardenSearch, with over 2658 records. We’re working on an interactive botanic garden mapping tool too…

There’s a filter for crop wild relatives. Seems to me the botanical gardens community may be a bit further down the road out of database hell than the world’s genebanks.

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“A man is related to all nature”

Mark Easton, the BBC’s home editor, starts a blog post today with this quotation from Ralph Waldo Emerson as an introduction to making the point that the protected area of Wicken Fen in Lincolnshire is… ((Thanks to Indrani for the tipoff.))

…the product of complex interaction between plants, birds and animals. And fundamental to its existence were the apparently destructive activities of one animal in particular: man.

Well, that could be said of a lot of landscapes around the world. Even, possibly, as is increasingly argued, places like the Amazon, which until recently was generally regarded as nature in its most pristine state.

But to go back to Wicken Fen, which, incidentally, I remember very fondly, having done a certain amount of fieldwork there as an undergraduate. It seems “the [UK] government, anxious to protect another fragile habitat, the peat bog, wants 90% of composts and soil improvers to be peat-free by next year.” So peat digging was banned at Wicken Fen. Good, you say? Well, not so much. This change in a practice that has been going on for centuries has contributed to the local extinction of the rare fen orchid. And not only that, the fen violet too, probably:

The rural culture – which had cut the sedge for roofing and animal bedding – disappeared and the fen violet along with it. Its seeds may still survive in the peaty soil and occasionally a rare plant will push through the surface if the land has been disturbed, but the violet has not been seen at Wicken for more than a decade.

And the swallowtail butterfly and Montagu’s harrier as well, due to past changes in management practices.

So what to do. As Mark Easton says, nowadays “conservationists ape the principles of the ancient harvesters to protect what is left of the fen.” But not all agree. “Instead of trying to counteract nature, man should work with it.”

This is a much less predictable approach to conservation but, it seems to me, it is a philosophy more in tune with an acceptance that man is not god. We are part of nature too.

Fair enough, but what if you are managing a protected area specifically for a particular species of value? Say an important crop wild relative. I can imagine a situation where you might want to be a bit more intensive in your intervention, and a bit more predictable. Which is one of the reasons why I don’t think that “conventional” protected areas such as your average national park will ever be much use for CWR conservation, except by chance.

Incidentally, there’s a couple of CWRs at Wicken Fen, according to the great mapping facility on its website. Here’s where you can find Asparagus officinalis, for example: it’s that red square right at the top.

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