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Building a plant conservation toolkit

70 per cent of the genetic diversity of crops including their wild relatives and other socio-economically valuable plant species conserved, while respecting, preserving and maintaining associated indigenous and local knowledge.

That would be Target 9 of the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation, and we are all fully behind it, and all the others, of course. How to do it, though? Well, the new Plants 2020 website is planning to provide a toolkit in due course. 1 When? Well:

Please check back regularly for updates and new information.

Ugh. Yep. No RSS feed. Look, I know I’m nay-saying again, and that it’s really boring. But no RSS feed these days is just not on. I hope they’ll fix that soon because this will be an important resource, and I want to keep up to date without having to check back regularly.

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Feeding you information about feed

The CGIAR’s Systemwide Livestock Programme 2 has just announced the release of its latest database, this one on the nutritive value of feeds in Sub-Saharan Africa. You put in the name of some sort of feed, typically a plant species, and you get out data on nutritional composition, often from multiple samples, arranged in a couple of different ways, and downloadable. Nice enough, and very useful, I’m sure, for its target audience. However, at the risk of burnishing to a well-nigh mirror-like finish my reputation as a nay-sayer, I’d have to say that I missed a couple of things. One would be the ability to search on particular nutritional values. Then when a species with the appropriate combination of qualities pops up you could work out if you can grow it in your shamba using another nifty ILRI tool. And the other thing would be some kind of link to genebank accessions. Surely some of the samples analyzed were of material that’s conserved in the ILRI forages genebank? Maybe for ver. 2.0.

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Crawling the web for agrobiodiversity threats

We have often mused here — mainly idly, it must be said — about the possibility of an automated, internet-based system for monitoring the threat of genetic erosion. While we muse, it seems, others roll their sleeves up and, well, do stuff. Welcome to the Threat News Explorer, news of which has reached us via Resilience Science. We’re talking here about “multiple interacting threats (wildfire, insects, disease, invasive species, climate change, land use change)” to “wildlands,” rather than agricultural biodiversity, and so far it looks like mainly in the US. But still, it’s a start. And perhaps of interest to our friends working on the crop wild relatives of the US.

LATER: If you were doing agrobiodiversity threats, you might look at new disease records, for example…

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Featured: Kenyan hoes

Diana weighs in on the whole hoe thing:

This could be a misprint and-or misunderstanding on the part of the writer? Though, even at the ‘correct’ price, hoes can be a major investment for poorer smallholders. That is the case here in Burundi, where a hoe may be shared by several families and is often included as part of an agricultural ‘package’. In the 19th century in central-east Africa, economic transactions were frequently carried out with hoes.

Which kind of puts the whole thing in perspective.

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Getting genebanks right

There are 5,000 varieties of potatoes in the gene bank in Chile. Wotske, this year, is growing 17.

Wotske is Rosemary Wotske, owner of Poplar Bluff Farm near Strathmore in Canada, and more power to her. But what about this large potato genebank in Chile? That sounds interesting.

Too interesting, it turns out. Because of course there isn’t one, as anyone who has spent even five minutes looking into potato genebanks can ascertain. Or rather, there is a potato genebank in Chile but it’s got about 700 accessions and not 5,000 — or it did the last time the data in WIEWS were updated. And there is a much larger, international genebank not too far away, at the International Potato Center (CIP), but it’s got about 4,300 potato landraces, and Peru isn’t Chile is it?