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Our friends the seed dispersers

Botany One has been running an entertaining little series from Nigel Chaffey on how plants get about, as seeds and as the gametes that produce seeds. In the third and final part, we get to plants that could reasonably be considered of interest here, to whit cacao and useful forest trees. It turns out that chimpanzees in West Africa are not above nicking a few pods from cacao trees and spreading the seeds an average of 407 m from the plantations. I like the ideas that this illuminates the thorny question of who “owns” a crop.

Sticking with West African trees, it seems that gorilla and chimpanzee dung offers “a cost effective and non-invasive way to restore native forested habitats”. Of course, if the gorillas and chimpanzees are themselves threatened and don’t travel widely, that’s not going to help forests further afield. Chaffey suggests collecting their dung and distributing these auto-fertilising, self-selecting seed packages directly over the area to be reforested.

I wonder what the forest genetic resources people would make of that?

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A first for IRRI’s genebank

Seeds of an aromatic variety of rice from the International Rice Genebank Collection, accession IRGC 117265 (McNally et al., 2009), and of a commonly grown indica variety, ‘Macassane’, were planted for harvest in the 2015 dry season (DS) and 2016 wet season (WS), respectively (Fig. 1A,C). Seeds were sampled either from the International Rice Genebank (IRG) active collection (4°C) (IRGC 117265; https://doi.org/10.18730/1PG6J) or the storage facility (20°C and 30% RH) at the upland site (‘Macassane’) and held at 50°C for 5 days to break dormancy.

And so it begins. The first use (we think) of a DOI for a genebank accession in a published paper. Congratulations to Kath Whitehouse, Fiona Hay and Richard Ellis. And of course to the bridge-builder, Ruaraidh Sackville Hamilton, who had this to say:

We are now waiting to see how soon the Global Information System will “harvest” this info. In due course it should automatically discover that this publication’s DOI refers to this PGRFA’s DOI, and link the two DOIs.

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Brainfood: Coffee apocalypse, Barley journey, Haplotype cores, Pollinator conservation, Rooting for tubers, Aussie CWR, European veggies, Capsicum evolution, Wheat genome

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New livestock diversity information system is here, almost

With about 20% of the world’s local farm animal breeds currently at risk of extinction, urgent action is needed to safeguard livestock diversity. This event will showcase the launch of an updated FAO tool, called the Domestic Animal Diversity Information System, or DAD-IS, that countries can use to monitor animal genetic resources that are important for food and agriculture. Containing information on 8,800 breeds of livestock and poultry across the world, the new DAD-IS platform can be used to measure SDG progress, create attractive graphics and tables for internal reporting purposes or export data for scientific analysis.

Sounds great, and you can see all the details on the recent webcast from FAO. But it’s still the old version that’s online, damn it. So when are we going to see (or hear) all the new bells and whistles? Well, as it happens, a member of the audience asked that very same question, and the answer is about 1:29 hours (sic) in: Monday, 27 November. How am I going to get through the weekend? Stay tuned for the results of my road test.

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Reviewing plant conservation in the Anthropocene

An interesting review is just out by the Grand Old Man of plant conservation (or one of them), Vernon Heywood, under the title Plant conservation in the Anthropocene – challenges and future prospects. It’s a long read, but worth it, and thanks go to the Kunming Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences for funding open access.

One bit that struck me in particular comes at the bottom of page 13 of the PDF version, where Prof. Heywood compares the status of ex situ conservation in wild and cultivated species:

Protected Area systems were one conspicuous exception but for other areas, such as ex situ conservation, no attempt was made to put in place the necessary global institutional structure. This contrasts with the situation for agriculture and forestry which when faced with the widespread erosion of genetic diversity in crops, a gene bank system and appropriate protocols for the collection, storage and access to seed was developed by organizations such as the FAO, CGIAR and IBPGR (now Bioversity International) and a number of national and regional gene banks were also created. For ex situ conservation of wild species, no serious efforts were made to address the issue of capacity and it was left to botanic gardens to attempt to take on the role of ex situ conservation of plants although in most cases without the necessary staff, support or finance (Heywood, 2009). Spain was one of the few countries — in fact a pioneer — to recognize this need and the environment agencies of some autonomous governments helped to create or support seed banks in some botanic gardens or other centres. Even more critical is the situation for the conservation of target species in situ for which no dedicated institutional arrangements have been put in place with the consequence that the relevant 2020 targets are unlikely to be met.

While fair enough as far as it goes, this seems to me to ignore the work of the Millennium Seed Bank at Kew in supporting partnerships for ex situ conservation of wild plant species around the world, and indeed also downplays the successes of botanical gardens, and their networking arrangements under Botanic Gardens Conservation International.