This image of ‘Glass Gem’ corn has sort of exploded on Milkwood Permaculture’s Facebook page, with over 3,000 “likes” and 10,000 “shares.” I just hope there’s enough seed out there.
Glass gem corn goes viral
Mapping some life
Yes, indeed Map of Life is indeed live, as we Nibbled yesterday, at least for amphibians, birds, reptiles, mammals and fish. 1 MoL pulls in point data from GBIF, of course, but also polygon distribution maps from IUCN, user-uploaded maps, local inventories from various sources and the regional checklists from WWF. That’s a whole load of different sources, formats and types of data to be served up in one googly visualization. Quite impressive. Which does make one wonder why one is reduced to screengrabs to share the results, as for example below for the yak and Dall’s Sheep, two of the high altitude mammals we featured a few days back. No doubt they’ll sort that out.
And we of course also look forward to the inclusion of plants, and in particular crop wild relatives, in the near future. We can point them to some data sources for those…
Featured: Plant Genetic Resources Newsletter
Peterson Wambugu misses the Plant Genetic Resources Newsletter and doesn’t care who knows it:
We are still mourning the death of PGRN. What became of efforts to resurrect it which had been initiated about 2 years ago. The Newsletter was a vital source of information on genetic resources. We really miss it.
So how about it, guys? How are those plans for resurrection going?
Arnold Arboretum goes mobile
The Arnold Arboretum has a nifty new app which lets you access information about individual plants right on your mobile phone as you walk around the grounds. And that of course includes lots of crop wild relatives…
Feral or relict: you decide
What do you call an escaped agricultural plant? I ask because two recent items have made me wonder. Exhibit A, a Zester Daily article entitled Wild Apple Adventure. Naturally I conjured up scenes of derring do in the mountains around Almaty. How disappointing, then, to discover that Zester’s version of “wild” is actually “feral,” apple trees that have either survived the orchard around them or else are seedlings growing in the wild.
Exhibit B, a recent announcement on a mailing list of a meeting on Nordic Relict Plants. 2 I’d always thought of relicts as leftovers from massive ecological changes, like relict rain forests, or relict pockets of pre-ice age flora. But no …
This meeting is for everyone with an interest in relict plants, particularly but not exclusively, in Nordic and Arctic areas. By a relict plant we mean a plant species or variety that was, but is no longer, cultivated in a particular place, and has survived in that place after cultivation stopped. These plants are important parts of our cultural history and can sometimes contain genetic material that is different from more modern varieties of the plant.
So, what should one call these plants? Wild, to me, sounds wrong. Feral, most dictionaries I consulted agree, suggests both “not domesticated or cultivated” and “having escaped from domestication”. To which at least one helpfully adds “having escaped from domestication and become wild,” which is surely not true of erstwhile crops.
I rather like “relict”. What do you think?”