Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

April 29, 2021

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.

April 28, 2021May 1, 2021

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:

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

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

April 27, 2021April 27, 2021

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:

Rarotonga and Aitutaki, Cook Islands
Upolu, Samoa
West New Britain, Papua New Guinea

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.

April 27, 2021April 28, 2021

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…

April 26, 2021April 14, 2021

Brainfood: PES, WTP, Agroforestry, SPA, Urban trees, Plant uses, Fish diversity, Gene editing, Algae, HTP, Cassava breeding, Barcoding, Grasspea genomics, Ancient farmers

Reducing Hunger with Payments for Environmental Services (PES): Experimental Evidence from Burkina Faso. Paying farmers during the lean season for keeping trees alive results in better diets and livelihoods.
Payments for Conservation of Animal Genetic Resources in Agriculture: One Size Fits All? No, pay pig prices for pigs and sheep prices for sheep. No word on effects on diets and livelihoods.
Factors influencing the adoption of agroforestry by smallholder farmer households in Tanzania: Case studies from Morogoro and Dodoma. Mainly access to seeds and land. No word on effects on diets and livelihoods.
Seed production areas are crucial to conservation outcomes: benefits and risks of an emerging restoration tool. Somebody mention seeds?
Trees and their seed networks: The social dynamics of urban fruit trees and implications for genetic diversity. Maybe just source your seeds from cities?
Maximum levels of global phylogenetic diversity efficiently capture plant services for humankind. Species chosen from diverse lineages are more diversely useful than species chosen at random. Now to make sure seeds are available.
Aquatic biodiversity enhances multiple nutritional benefits to humans. Basically the above, but with fish.
Improving Nutritional and Functional Quality by Genome Editing of Crops: Status and Perspectives. Or, we could just genetically edit some random species, fish or otherwise.
Exploring, harnessing and conserving marine genetic resources towards a sustainable seaweed aquaculture. Maybe even seaweeds?
Picturing the future of food. I wonder if the high-throughput phenotyping described here will work on seaweeds.
New cassava germplasm for food and nutritional security in Central Africa. 16x greater fresh root yield than the local landrace check wouldn’t need fancy phenotyping to pick up.
Reliable genomic strategies for species classification of plant genetic resources. This high throughput genotyping and data analysis approach certainly seems to work in picking up misidentified crop wild relatives in genebank collections. No word on seaweeds yet though.
Grasspea, a critical recruit among neglected and underutilized legumes, for tapping genomic resources. Including its wild relatives, of course.
An integrative skeletal and paleogenomic analysis of prehistoric stature variation suggests relatively reduced health for early European farmers. Who’d be a farmer, though, eh? But then they didn’t get payments for ecosystem services, nor gene-edited seaweeds.