Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
We forget sometimes, in our cosy little crop genebank world, that botanic gardens do ex situ conservation of agricultural biodiversity too. ((Botanic Gardens Conservation International (BCGI) even allows you to search botanic garden collections for crop wild relatives.)) Witness the Royal Botanic Gardens Endinburgh and the Really Wild Vegetable Project. I only know about it …
Continue reading “Botanic gardens conserve crop diversity too”
Readers with a long(ish) memory may remember some uncertainty a couple of years back over the future of the UK’s national collections of vegetable diversity at Wellesbourne. I’m glad to say the genebank is flourishing as part of Warwick University, with funding from Defra. It even has a Twitter feed, over which there is currently …
Check out one of the illustrations in Brainpicking’s review of a recent book on the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia (“which stands today as the oldest natural history museum in the Western Hemisphere,” and just celebrated its 200th anniversary). It’s the one labelled “Agricultural seed samples collected by Charles F. Kuenne, 1948,” towards the …
Continue reading “A glass vial of beans is worth a thousand database entries”
Occasionally — just occasionally — Genebank Database Hell doesn’t live up to its fearsome reputation. Or maybe it’s just diminished expectations on my part, I’m not sure. Anyway, Eurisco confirms that the Irish onion called Buan Jeremy blogged about yesterday is found in the genebanks at Warwick and VIR. Interestingly, a grand total of 7 …
Chasing stuff down, because we can, sometimes results in (very mild) disappointment. When I read about an onion called “Lafort (sourced originally from the Wellbourne [sic] gene bank and regenerated by Irish Seed Savers,” we not only Nibbled it, I also dropped a note to Irish Seedsavers asking for the full story. I had hoped …
Continue reading “Lafort onion, and Wellesbourne, revisited”