- Wiki for African forest information. Go, make it multilingual, fill in the gaps, use it.
- Canola (rape) desalinates, gives fuel and enriched fodder. Jeremy comments: “I’m a tad skeptical.”
- Diversity of intestinal flora good for your figure. Or the other way around.
- Edamame bean comes to Britain. Why, one wonders.
- Golf courses good for salamanders. I wonder if anyone’s looked at how many CWRs they support.
- Chestnuts roasting on an open fire.
- Rice domestication unpacked.
- More extreme beer. Oh, and the phylogeny of yeast.
Cocoa from tree to cup
News from both ends of the cacao value chain today. At the upstream end, new molecular marker work on over a thousand genebank accessions reveals that the species is divided into no less than 10 genetic clusters, rather than the conventionally recognized two. These show a clear geographic pattern: they are strung out along an east-west axis in the Amazon, probably reflecting, according to the authors, the location of ancient ridges (“palaeoarches”), which were barriers to dispersal not only for Theobroma but also for various fish groups. Meanwhile, at the downstream end, there’s an account of a visit to a “chocoholic mecca” in Santa Fe.
LATER. And, for the trifecta, news from somewhere around the middle of the value chain.
LATER STILL. What comes after trifecta?
Nibbles: Sustainable agriculture, Zizania
- Llamas protect livestock from predators. And so much more about making agriculture wilder.
- Distant wild relative of rice runs amok in New Zealand.
CWR and medicinal species in botanic gardens
Suzanne Sharrock of Botanic Gardens Conservation International (BGCI) has left a very interesting comment on our post a couple of day ago about the overlap between wild medicinal plants and wild crop relatives. Rather than letting it languish in obscurity, I’m reproducing it below:
At BGCI we have developed a list of around 3,000 plant species that are used for medicinal purposes. Of these, we know that 1,802 are in cultivation in botanic gardens and this list can be easily extracted from our PlantSearch database. Simply select “medicinal plants” and the list of medicinal plants that are in cultivation in botanic gardens is displayed. On this list, plants that are also CWR are marked (according to a list of CWR genera). If you download the list, it can be easily be manipulated in excel so you can extract those species (164 species) that are both medicinal plants and crop wild relatives and are in cultivation in botanic gardens.
If anyone is interested, we could provide the full list of plants that are on both our medicinal and CWR lists — not just those in cultivation in botanic gardens.
Overexploiting crop wild relatives?
One of the seven plants studied in a recent IUCN report on overexploitation of wild medicinal plants in India is in a genus (Dioscorea) with a number of cultivated species. How many wild medicinal plants worldwide could also be classed as crop wild relatives?