Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

July 1, 2014July 1, 2014

An e-atlas for the ages

I do love maps. I love looking through atlases, even their faintly ridiculous 21st century incarnation, the e-atlas. But really, in this world we live in now — rather than that of bewhiskered gentlemen poring over suspiciously stained folios in the libraries of London clubs, motes of dust dancing in the air as each leaf is turned over and final plans are agreed for their next foray into the Heart of Darkness — what is an atlas for? Surely it is for more than just displaying the ingenuity and skill of the mapmakers? There is much ingenuity and skill on display in the new online version of the Atlas of African Agriculture Research & Development, don’t get me wrong. But what do the mapmakers think their atlas is for? I don’t think it is enough to say that there are

…plans for an online, open-access resource of spatial data and tools that will be generated and maintained by a community of research scientists, development analysts, and practitioners working in and for Africa.

If you’re going to call something an e-atlas and put it online, to much fanfare, you can’t just make the maps available for download and sharing as PDFs. That’s really no use to anyone. Take these maps on growing season length and its likely changes.

What anyone would want to do is start combining these with other data, say on — oh I don’t know, let me think — the distribution of germplasm in genebanks? Like this on pearl millet, according to Genesys.

I’m pretty sure that there must be some pearl millet landraces in genebanks somewhere with the adaptation to shorter growing seasons that we’re going to need in the sorts of places highlighted by that Map 2 from the e-atlas. And that we might find those with the help of their Map 1 and the data from Genesys (which I can donwload as a KML). But how can I be sure, when Maps 1 and 2 are only available as PDFs? ¹

Anyway, maybe I won’t have long to wait. There are plans, after all. I don’t know, maybe the maps in the e-atlas are already available elsewhere as KMLs or shapefiles or something usable, and you just have to ask? But then, what is this e-atlas for? Nice maps, though. Lots of fun to leaf through.

June 30, 2014June 23, 2014

Brainfood: Landrace trifecta, Cauliflower breeding, Carp hybrids, C4 evolution, Organic food, Symbionts squared, Ozark agrobiodiversity, Using genebanks, Food security vulnerability

Geopolitical Maize: Peasant Seeds, Everyday Practices, and Food Security in Mexico. Growing landraces in Mexico as a feminist act.
Resource-Use Patterns in Swidden Farming Communities: Implications for the Resilience of Cassava Diversity. In this bit of Brazil, all farmers have some cassava varieties, other varieties are more private, which means that diversity is reasonably well maintained if farms are lost at random. Ah, but what about if women farmers are lost?
Indigenous Knowledge on Landraces and Fonio-Based Food in Benin. 35 landraces, some of them even agronomically good. No word on whether those are the common or the private ones.
A Review on Genetic Improvement of Cauliflower. There’s a tension between hybrids and breeding for organic conditions even in cauliflower.
Growth Performance of Indian Major Carps and Their Hybrids in Polyculture in Bangladesh. Looks like hybrids are bad in carp, though.
Deep Evolutionary Comparison of Gene Expression Identifies Parallel Recruitment of Trans-Factors in Two Independent Origins of C4 Photosynthesis. Plants which diverged 140 million years ago have in the meantime evolved the same trans-factors (“protein that binds to specific DNA sequences, thereby controlling the flow [or transcription] of genetic information from DNA to messenger RNA”) to come up with C4 photosynthesis. You know, this C4 rice thing just might be doable.
Organic Diets Significantly Lower Children’s Dietary Exposure to Organophosphorus Pesticides. When “conventional” food was replaced by organically grown stuff, children had lower levels of nasties in the urine. No word on what it took to convince the kids to eat their veggies.
Building the crops of tomorrow: advantages of symbiont-based approaches to improving abiotic stress tolerance. Why breed, when you can inoculate.
A single evolutionary innovation drives the deep evolution of symbiotic N2-fixation in angiosperms. It all started long ago with a cryptic mutation, which was lost and gained multiple times, but some clades are unlikely to lose it when they have gained it.
Seeds of Persistence: Agrobiodiversity in the American Mountain South. “…southern/central Appalachia is the most diverse foodshed at the varietal level in the United States, Canada, and northern Mexico studied to date.”
Separating the wheat from the chaff – a strategy to utilize plant genetic resources from ex situ genebanks. Using fancy math to mine legacy phenotypic data can yield a couple extra alleles.
Sustainability and Food & Nutrition Security: A Vulnerability Assessment Framework for the Mediterranean Region. Take each vulnerability (say to climate change, or price volatility) and break it down into exposure, sensitivity and adaptive capacity.

June 27, 2014June 27, 2014

Happy birthday, Bioversity International

Celebrate by reading the new strategy, or the Director General’s blog. Many happy returns to the day.

June 25, 2014June 26, 2014

Good times for Seeds of Time

We somehow missed the news that Seeds of Time, Sandy McCloud‘s documentary about pioneering seed saver Cary Fowler, had won the Audience Award at the San Francisco Green Film Festival. Congratulations to all concerned. Here’s the trailer. Hope it comes your way.

Coincidentally, Prof. Brian Cox has been filming for the BBC up at the Svalbard Global Seed Vault this week.

Fascinating day filming at the Global Seed Vault in Svalbard – the world's seeds, stored for thousands of years! http://t.co/fIoPNWujVf

— Brian Cox (@ProfBrianCox) June 25, 2014

June 25, 2014June 25, 2014

Not so boring Bonn

A nice evening yesterday listening to a great talk by Dr Ola Westengen of NordGen on the importance of global efforts to conserve crop diversity, and in particular the role of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. That was followed by a reception in a very pleasant space in the Mediterranean section of the botanic garden of the University of Bonn. But not before a tour of the economic plants collection, which is across the road from the main grounds of the botanic garden. Well worth a visit if you’re ever in Bonn. Perhaps unusually, this botanic garden has a long history of interest in the study and conservation of crop diversity. For example, Friedrich August Koernicke, who worked there in the middle of the 19th century, made a famous collection of local cereal landraces. A little genebank is being developed for long-term seed storage, which should be ready by the end of the summer.