Posts

Posted on

Citizens map crops and their wild relatives

Our friend and occasional contributor Colin Khoury has made a “project” on iNaturalist focusing on the crop wild relatives found in the USA.

iNaturalist collates and manages citizen science observations of living things, with a machine learning algorithm helping with species identification. If the observation you document on your phone app gets verified by two other people, it’s rated as “Research Grade,” and included in GBIF.

Colin also had a go at pulling together observations on major food crops, though there’s no way of including only observations of cultivated material. This is a map of tepary beans (Phaseolus acutifolius), for example.

Cool, no? Join in! There’s only one observation of Bambara groundnut. Surely we can do something about that.

Posted on

More online genebank training

…MSBP’s popular Seed Conservation Techniques (SCT) training course will be running from the 11th to the 22nd of October 2021. Following the Partnership’s agreed Seed Conservation Standards, the course provides trainees with the knowledge needed to collect, conserve and manage high quality ex situ collections of wild plant seeds. Topics covered will include: planning a seed collection programme, assessing and collecting techniques, post-harvest handling, measuring seed moisture content, seed processing and quality assessment, and seed germination and dormancy. After a successful first online version was piloted last year, we will again offer a fully online 2-week training course with content provided online as a mixture of live sessions, pre-recorded training modules and practical exercises.

More info on the Kew website.

Posted on

Want to learn about genebanks (and much much more)?

Thanks to funding from a USDA-NIFA-Higher Education Challenge Grant Program, the good folks at Colorado State University are offering a new online course on Plant Genetic Resources- Genomes, Genebanks, and Growers. You will:

  1. Discover the origins of plant genetic resources
  2. Appreciate the role they play in global food systems
  3. Learn about plant domestication and diversification
  4. Understand their genetic properties and the forces that shape them
  5. Explore geographic patterns of plant diversity

It looks great. Find out more here. Starts in August. I’m kinda tempted to take it myself…

Posted on

Yes we have banana catalogues

Great to hear that recent banana diversity collecting in my old stamping ground of the Pacific ((And, yes, we have blogged about this sort of thing before. And, yes, I do need to stop using this cliche in banana posts. But not today.)) has resulted in three beautiful germplasm catalogues:

In due course, this material will end up in the Musa International Transit Centre and will be available for breeding, research and training under the SMTA of the Plant Treaty.

Posted on

A taste of coffee to come

Seems like it’s probably worth recapping the whole new-species-will-save-your-morning-coffee-from-climate-change story that’s been going around.

It all started last year with a paper describing the rediscovery in the wilds of Sierra Leone of a species of coffee that used to be very well liked but then fell out of commercial favour due to low yields. It’s called Coffea stenophylla ((More on this database of wild coffee here. There is only one entry for C. stenophylla in Genesys, from CATIE, but there are some doubts about it.)) and of course Jeremy did a podcast about it, interviewing one of the authors of said paper, the very engaging Prof. Jeremy Haggar.

Fast forward a year and we now have a follow-up paper assessing the taste of coffee made from beans of C. stenophylla from that (very tiny, alas) wild population in Sierra Leone and also from a (more substantial) CIRAD research stand in La Reunion. And guess what? It’s really good. So of course Jeremy went back to Prof. Haggar for another nice chat.

C. stenophylla grows in hot and humid lowlands, so it’s a little more ready for climate change than your average arabica. ((There’s also a video now.)) Still, the yield issue is presumably still there, and no doubt other problems will arise, as they always do. But I’m keeping my fingers crossed, because I really want to taste the stuff — and boost Sierra Leonean business along the way.

Oh and of course we’ll have to revise the global coffee diversity conservation strategy now…