The blog carnival know as Berry Go Round is up and about for the 31st time. Do go have a look at its tempting miscellany of botanical lore. And if you arrived here from A Blog Around The Clock, welcome.
Mediterranean hotspots get Nagoya love
It must be the spirit of Nagoya, because following the announcement of publication of a list of threatened plant species from IUCN and Kew, there’s news of a major conservation effort, this one focusing on the Mediterranean.
The areas targeted look to me like they might well have quite a few crop wild relatives. 1
• Southwest Balkans
• Mountains, Plateaus and Wetlands of Algerian Tell and Tunisia
• Atlas Mountains
• Taurus Mountains
• Cyrenaican Peninsula and
• Orontes Valley and Lebanon Mountains 2
There’s more information on the project, including an ” ecosystem profile” and a call for proposals, on the website of the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund.
Featured: Spatial data
Glenn tells us Google is all people need to find the spatial data they need.
Whether we could find spatial data from Google or whether we need some kind of special setup has not yet been fully resolved… I understand that Google is working on some protocols for finding spatial data. But my sense is that this question has been put on the back burner because people don’t think it is all that relevant. They can seem to find what they need.
One less thing for the CG to do, I guess.
Plants in peril
Kew and IUCN made a splash today with the Sampled Red List Index for Plants. A representative sample of 7,000 species of plants was selected from the comprehensive IUCN Red List Index for detailed monitoring. 3 You can contribute to the Sampled Red List in a wiki-like environment, and follow its progress on the inevitable blog. An interactive map allows some basic exploration of the data. The headline number is that 25% of plant species are threatened. There are various crop wild relatives among the 7,000 species, 4 so it might be possible to calculate some statistics for that particular category, to complement other efforts.
The geography of black rice
Sometimes it pays to spend some time in Genebank Database Hell, if you can fight through the pain.
You may remember a piece recently about the antioxidant properties of black rice. But where does black rice come from? Well, hanging around with the Genesys and GRIN-Global crowd in the past couple of days has allowed me to come up with this map in answer to that deceptively simple question.
In yellow are all the rice accessions from Asia which have coordinates, as recorded in the IRRI database, EURISCO and GRIN. In red are the black rice accessions.
You’d have thought such a map would be pretty easy to make. But you’d be wrong. I had to get an Excel spreadsheet from IRRI with the characterization data, 5 and mash it up with the passport data in Genesys for the same accessions, and then export two separate kmz files and fiddle around in Google Earth. 6 Well, they don’t call it Genebank Database Hell for nothing. But it is getting better, slowly but surely.