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Happy 150th birthday to the Missouri Botanical Garden

There’s a nice, informative piece on the history and achievements of the Missouri Botanical Gardens in the St Louis Post-Dispatch. It celebrates the garden’s 150th anniversary this year, very much focusing on the international research aspects of its work.

Leading those efforts is Peter Raven, the garden’s director since 1971.

“What Dr. Raven has done is establish a world-class research organization that’s dedicated to protecting biodiversity around the globe,” said Roger Beachy, president of the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center. “His vision is global, and the garden’s work reflects that.”

You may remember a little post we did about the place last year on the occasion of its 6 millionth specimen.

Not only are garden scientists routinely discovering plants new to science, they’re also investigating plants to be used in new drugs and those that form the backbone of the world’s food supply.

Unfortunately there was not much more in the article about the plants that form the “backbone of the world’s food supply,” which I take to be a reference to work on crop wild relatives.

One tool the garden has developed that is assisting scientists do just that is the Tropicos database, which contains more than 3.5 million plant records, the world’s largest.

“If you want to preserve an ecosystem, you’d better know what plants you have,” said Rainer Bussmann, director of the William L. Brown Center for Plant Genetic Resources.

The Brown Center is where garden staff conducts its applied research, studying plants used for medicine, supplements, food and clothing. Among the plants garden staff have reviewed is the rosy periwinkle, which produces a drug shown to help children with leukemia.

Surely there was a better example than that old chestnut!

The Post-Dispatch also has a bunch of videos on the garden.

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Will climate change make protected areas useless?

Not for birds in Africa, apparently — and surprisingly, at least to me. 1 A recent paper looked at likely turnover of species in Important Bird Areas (IBAs) in Africa under a range of climate change scenarios. The results showed that although there would be significant shifts in the species composition of individual IBAs, overall about 90% of 815 endangered species “are projected to retain suitable habitat by 2085 in at least one IBA where they occur currently.” And some IBAs will become newly suitable for some species. Only a few endangered species will lose all suitable habitat from the IBA network.

Nevertheless, the authors acknowledge the importance of the shifts in species distribution and suggest a number of recommendations. In particular, the results highlight the need for regionally focused management approaches. For example, increasing the number and size of protected areas, providing ‘stepping stones’ between habitats and protected areas and restoring critical types of habitat, as well as ensuring that the current IBA network is adequately protected into the future.

Sensible recommendations, which would apply all the more strongly to any similar network for crops wild relatives, say, which don’t by and large have the mobility of birds. 2 We need to carry out a similar resilience study for CWRs in protected areas, I would suggest. But also, do we know how good the IBAs are at capturing CWR diversity? I suspect when people look at CWR distributions in protected areas, it is mainly national parks and the like that they consider, rather than such specialized things as IBAs, but I could be wrong. 3 Here’s the distribution of IBAs in Africa. I seem to be having a thing about maps of Africa lately.

africa_ramsar_ibas_map

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Lost Crops of Africa on air

The National Research Council’s series on Lost Crops … is on our shelves, and well-thumbed too. Now comes news that Voice of America has just launched a five part series reporting on various aspects of the story. The first episode — “Lost Crops” of Africa Could Combat Poverty and Hunger — is online here, with links so you can download and listen to the broadcasts.

Other episodes available are:

It’s odd, though, that in the final episode Professor Damania gives the impression that only two of the CGIAR centres are involved in research on these lost crops. We can think of others…

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Yield trial sites mapped

Glenn Hyman has a great map over at AGCommons. It shows the sites in Africa where international crop networks carried out yield trials in the 1960’s, 70’s and 80’s (and some beyond). Here it is:

trialsites2

Would be interesting to compare with the various accessibility maps I posted a couple of days ago, and indeed with agroclimatic maps. No doubt Glen is doing it as we speak, and lots of other stuff too.

Read the interesting comment too: “Africa’s green revolutions will be fundamentally different from Asia’s — because Africa and Asia are fundamentally different, because times have changed, and because we have learnt a few tricks in the meanwhile!!”