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Wallow Fire (may) threaten (some) wild beans. Maybe.

There’s a really bad fire spreading in Arizona. 1

You can donwload all kinds of stuff about it, and even post your experiences of it on Facebook. But can you find out whether any crop wild relatives are threatened by it? Well, sure: all you have to do is go off to GBIF, and choose a likely genus (Phaseolus, say), and download the records, and mash them up in Google Earth with the latest fire perimeter data or whatever. 2 Like I’ve done here:

Coming in closer, and using the NASA GeoTIFF instead of the normal Google Earth imagery, you can put yourself in the position of being able to make some reasonably intelligent guesses about what might be happening to some of these populations, and the genepool as a whole in the area:

But what I really meant is that there ought to be a way to do this automagically, or something. Anyway, it is sobering to reflect that while all hell is breaking loose in Arizona, not that far away to the northeast, in the peaceful surroundings of the Denver Botanical Garden, Anasazi beans are enjoying their day in the sun, utterly oblivious of the mortal threat faced by some of their wild cousins. It’s a cruel world. And there’s a point in all this about the need for complementary conservation strategies that’s just waiting to be made. Isn’t there?

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Breathing life into research

We who are stuck at headquarters, trying to inject a little life into our organisation’s activities, envy the scientists whose activities they are. What adventures they must have! What people they must meet, whose lives they touch and whose lives touch them! What material they must be storing for their anecdotage! What stories they could tell!

Except that they can’t. Because they are researchers. Doing research.

Kenya's favourite beer It’s not that they don’t have the skills. Some of them can tell great stories over a Tusker, baridi sana, and many take wonderful photos and even videos. It’s that they don’t have time when they’re in the field, precisely because they are doing the activities we are trying so hard to breathe life into. And when they get back here, there’s more work to be done. But what if there’s someone tagging along whose de facto job is not to do the stuff but to record the stuff others are doing? You get a rich set of impressions that can really help to bring a project to life, often unintentionally.

Bioversity’s recent field visit to some of its nutrition research in Kenya benefitted from just such a presence, resulting in a fascinating report from “the unofficial video guy”. What’s so nice about it is the immediacy of the impressions. The people were welcoming and gracious. There’s something called “African rice” that is “split and processed” maize. Muù, a “strange fruit that tasted like bittersweet marzipan”. The bus breaking down across both lanes of the road home, giving everyone a chance to learn a grain grinding song, all caught on video.

This is not a plea for jolly outings. It is a plea to recognize two things. That much of the time researchers have more important things to do than think about how to gussy up their work for wider consumption. And that someone whose job it is to do such gussying may stand a better chance of bringing a body of work to life.

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More on visualizing collecting localities

Clearly short of something to say after the almighty media circus generated by the climate change hotspots publication, our friend Andy Jarvis is reduced to celebrating an embarassingly artificial milestone on the DAPA blog today. Normally I would treat such awkward space filling with the contempt it deserves, but today I’m in the mood to, well, fill space. So here goes.

Andy’s post is about the 90m-resolution digital elevation dataset he and his colleagues have been working on for ages. The milestone he trumpets is 750,000 visitors, but more important is the fact that the data is now visible in Google Earth, which I didn’t know. Here’s what a bit of Spain looks like with the normal Google Earth imagery, the records on show being from Genesys. 3

And this is what the same area looks like using the SRTM data:

Advantages to both, I suppose, from a purely aesthetic point of view.

Incidentally, some further playing around with Google Earth revealed a couple of collecting localities for Beta maritima (from GBIF this time) that are easily visible in Street View. Here’s an example, featuring a record from France’s Inventaire national du Patrimoine naturel (INPN), catalogue number INPN_21204166 in case you’re interested. 4

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Food and Security: diverse views agree

The timing on the E. coli outbreak in Europe is perfect: right on the heels of the "periphery" debt crises, you’ve got the same countries (Spain, etc.) squared off against the same "victims" (Germany foots the bailout bill disproportionally and now suffers disproportionally on this tainted food outbreak). Bottom line: you – Mr. Terrorist – have created tons of enmity, economic loss, and discombobulating fear. If I’m al Qaeda, I’m claiming this one on principle.

Thomas Barnett’s take on the ways in which food impacts our future security are disconcerting, interesting, scary, and in a warped way rather entertaining.

And then there’s this, from a commentary on the G8‘s recent meeting in Deauville:

[T]he world is now better able to feed itself. But the same economic stimuli that underpin higher food output also lead to supply problems, a decline in living standards, and massive social strains, especially in urban centers.

This is important to bear in mind, because rising food prices have historically been the trigger for political revolutions. The three revolutions that made the modern world, in France, Russia, and China, all had their immediate origins in food shortages, fear of hunger, and disputes about food pricing.

Luckily I know better than to quote ancient Chinese proverbs.

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Protecting PI 198758 and its neighbours

Can’t resist a little follow-up to Jeremy’s biographical sketch of PI 198758, which as you’ll remember is a wild beet which hails from Le Pouliguen in France and has some coveted nematode resistance or other. If you look for the taxon in question (B. vulgaris subsp. maritima, and variations thereof) in GBIF, you get quite a few hits around the area of Le Pouliguen, which is in the Loire. And if you check that general region on Natura 2000 you realize that a lot of that coast is protected, whether under the Habitats Directive or the Birds Directive or whatever.

The question, of course, is whether the managers of such protected areas as Mor Braz (that’s the northern polygon on the map) and the Estuaire de la Loire Nord (the southern polygon) are aware of this or any other crop wild relative that may chance to occur in their charges. I suspect that even if you told them, alas, they would not much care. And yes, I know that some of those records seem to fall in the sea. Take it up with the Service du Patrimoine naturel, Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, who provided the original data to GBIF.