Computer helps nut hunt

Floramap could help find 20 new peanut varieties

By Alex Kirby BBC News Online environment correspondent

Scientists searching for rare plants should now find life easier, thanks to a computer tool called FloraMap.

It is for use when a plant has already been found but where little or nothing is known about its physiology.

All it needs is the latitude, longitude and altitude of each site where earlier specimens were found.

FloraMap then produces probability maps showing other likely locations.

The program, on a CD-ROM, has been developed by Peter Jones, of the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), near Cali in Colombia.

Climate changes

FloraMap works on the assumption that climate is a strong indicator of the environmental range of wild plants and other organisms.

So it selects as probable sites those whose climate profiles closely match those of the plants' original homes.

Its maps can also find suitable locations for cultivating promising wild species, and may help to decide which natural habitats can best be conserved as living gene banks.

There are hopes as well that FloraMap may be instrumental in pinpointing the best places to search for plants whose existence is suspected but unproven.

New nuts

Researchers in Latin America believe they are running out of time to find wild relatives of the peanut, also known as the groundnut, which is an important source of protein and oil for people in developing countries.

About 90% of the world's peanuts are grown in the developing world.

But while North American farmers produce less than 8% of the crop, their yields average three to five times the harvests of third world farmers.

David Williams is an ethnobotanist at the International Plant Genetic Resources Institute (IPGRI) in Cali.

There are 68 known wild peanut species, but he estimates that there are perhaps 15 to 20 more awaiting discovery.

He is especially keen to find a wild peanut known as the B-genome parent, thought to be one of the original parents of today's domesticated crop.

Nobody knows exactly what characteristics it may contain, but finding it would let scientists reconstruct the types of peanuts which humans first ate more than 5,000 years ago.

Dr Williams says: "The B-genome parent is the holy grail of peanut evolution."

On the basis of a previous expedition and on new data from FloraMap, he believes the plant is most probably in a small unexplored part of the Gran Chaco region, which lies on the border between Bolivia and Paraguay.

Dr Williams said: "The benefits of transferring - using conventional breeding techniques - disease and drought resistance of wild peanuts into domesticated varieties are enormous.

Otherwise farmers and consumers around the world face an irreversible loss."

He and his colleagues fear the impact of the completion of a huge natural gas pipeline from Bolivia to Brazil.

The project has opened up remote areas to settlers and agriculture, threatening the wild peanuts' habitats with destruction and also antagonising indigenous people, who are now demanding a ban on any further encroachment from outside.

So Bolivia is refusing scientists permits to remove wild peanuts for safekeeping.

Dr Williams says he and his colleagues have strong support from the Bolivian environment ministry and from the country's scientists.

If the ban is lifted, he says, IPGRI would give duplicate samples of the plants to Bolivian researchers, the US Department of Agriculture, and to the world peanut collection maintained by the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-arid Tropics (Icrisat) in India.