MGIS updates 2024 first quarter

Dear MGIS Users,

Foreword:

First, we would like to honour the memory of two well-known Banana researchers: Dr. Edmond De Langhe and Dr. Hughes Tezenas du Montcel. They both passed away between the end of 2023 and the beginning of 2024. Without them and their vision, MGIS would not have existed. MGIS has obviously evolved a lot since the first concept appeared in the early 90s, but its current existence demonstrates that the idea was brilliant and still valid more than 25 years later.

We have continued to improve the content and the features of the MGIS web site.

For the past four years, in addition of the ex situ data, the MGIS website has been including in situ observations of Musa plants. These observations have been compiled and curated by Christophe Jenny from CIRAD from different sources: literatures, banana natural biodiversity mapping, Pl@ntNet, GBIF, Flickr photos and Google Street view. Picture links for later illustration were only saved where the copyright license complied with public sharing (namely CC-BY licenses).

To facilitate navigation between ex situ and in situ dataset we have reorganised the menu.

The diversity graph displayed on now the homepage reflects this aspect. The size of a node is proportional to the number of accessions/observations available in the database for that node. The diversity graph illustrates the collections contributing to the MGIS database (ex situ) or from in situ observations.


Menu update

The main menu was modified to better reflect the significant addition of the in situ data.

  • Two items refer to the ex situ and the in situ contents of the MGIS web site,
  • The three other items give access to explanations pages and the home page.

The ex situ collections menu unfold subitems that allow the accession search, give access to the Genotyping and phenotyping studies in which ITC accessions are cited and link to additional tools to download data or navigate through Musa classification, and obviously Gigwa.

The in situ observations menu gives a direct access to listing or mapping of in situ observations.

Data update

ITC collection
Seven new accessions have been introduced at ITC since 2022: 4 from West New Britain collecting mission October 2019, 1 from Cook Island collecting mission May 2019 and 2 from Samoa collecting mission August 2019. 

The quality of passport data for ITC collection have been improved by using:

  • literature,
  • old passport data files from partners' s collection,
  • new scanned collecting mission reports.

As a result, country of origin (+61) as well as geo reference (+93) and few collecting date have been retrieved and helped to improve the Passport Data Completeness Index (PDCI) (van Hintum et al. 2011) for the ITC collection. The value of the PDCI is now 7.07 for the entire ITC collection.

We would like to thank Matija Obreza from the Crop Trust who developed the passport data validation tool. The tool was instrumental for checking and suggesting coordinates fixes.

Publication

We continue to track articles that cite ITC accessions and map them to particular accessions and traits:

We wish you all the best for 2024. 

The MGIS team