At first I just wanted to Nibble it. “Alien plants in urban nature reserves: from red-list species to future invaders?” 1 looks at the effect of invasive plant species on the flora of 48 protected areas in the city of Prague. I was going to ask how many crop wild relatives are to be found in those reserves and leave it at that. Oh, ok maybe also make a throwaway comment along the lines of: In other news, Prague has 48 nature reserves. But I think it may be worth additionally pointing out an interesting feature that comes from publishing in the free-access journal NeoBiota. If you click on any of the taxon names in the HTML version of the paper you get a so-called PENSOFT Taxon Profile. What that seems to do is aggregate in a really attractive way a whole bunch of content on the species in question from everything from GBIF to Wikipedia to Google Scholar. You can create your own taxon profile if a species you really want to know about isn’t named in the paper you’re looking at. Compare to how the Crop Wild Relatives Portal does it. Good and less good things in both, I suppose. I like the way PENSOFT actually gives you the GBIF map and the images, plus also gene sequence references. But the Portal includes SINGER, Eurisco and GRIN searches. 2 And not a factsheet in sight.
And where is Luigi now?
Due to overwhelming popular demand, 3 here’s the next instalment of Luigi’s tour of Caucasus genebanks. Below is the site of the Scientific Center of Agrobiotechnology of the Ministry of Agriculture, which houses the Armenian national genebank, and is one of the key stakeholders in the national plant genetic resources programme. It is located in Echmiadzin (Էջմիածին), about a half hour drive to the west of Yerevan. A couple hundred meters north of the institute is the Mother Cathedral of Holy Etchmiadzin, the central cathedral of the Mother See of Holy Etchmiadzin of the Armenian Apostolic Church. The national genebank boasts something like 450 wheat, 300 chickpea and 100 capsicum accessions, among others. The Mother Cathedral of Holy Etchmiadzin boasts three pieces of the True Cross and a bit of Noah’s Ark.
Heirlooms for entrepreneurs
Pollin8r (geddit?)! An “open access photo bank of heirloom produce” and “an inventive new web-based project … that promises to connect heirloom-produce loving eaters to farmers willing to grow heritage produce — all with just the click of a mouse”. Bring it on? Bring it up?
Please, sir, what is an heirloom?
Autumnal Berry go Round
Apologies. I missed the publication of September’s Berry Go Round botanical blog carnival over at a DC Birding Blog. A birding blog? Well why not, they are as dependent on plants as the rest of us. Of agricultural interest is a post on sea buckthorn (Hippophae rhamnoides) in Berlin. Like baobab, sea buckthorn is everywhere. That’s superfruits for you. It even has fact sheets.
The next edition will be hosted at the slugyard. I do hope someone will have written something interesting about aspidistras. You can submit posts here, your own or someone else’s, botanical (sense latu) rather than gardening. And if you’re willing to be a host, drop me a line.
Featured: Enough with the factsheets already
Michael says what Luigi was too much of a wuss to do more than imply:
These factsheets can be nice corporate/project hand-outs, if well done, but otherwise a waste of time. When I need information on baobab or other useful plants, I certainly will not go to an institutional website to look for factsheets. I google, and what usually comes up is a Wikipedia article (as for baobab) with oftentimes far better information.