What is in a banana name?
Bioversity International’s global list of banana cultivar names hopes to help scientists sort out the crop’s taxonomy. Available on the ProMusa website, the list is highlighted in the Hortax Cultivated Plant Taxonomy News.
There are an estimated 500-1000 banana cultivated varieties (cultivars) in the world. As anyone working on bananas knows very well, it can be hard to navigate through local names of all these cultivars. Sometimes a cultivar is identified by more than one name, and sometimes the same name refers to different cultivars.
“For example, I would read about ‘Pisang Awak’ in Malaysia, ‘Kayinja’ in Uganda and ‘Ducasse’ in Australia – it took me a while to work out that these names are theoretically all referring to the same cultivar!", says Bioversity International scientist Rhiannon Crichton. To address these issues, Crichton started developing a global list of banana cultivar names, now available on Musapedia, the banana knowledge resource centre managed by ProMusa. The list, which currently contains almost 5,500 banana names, has been highlighted in the June issue of the Hortax Cultivated Plant Taxonomy News.
It will take time and effort, and contributions from many banana enthusiasts, to arrive at a really comprehensive and internally coherent checklist of banana cultivar names, but as one of the reviewers of the checklist observed, “a journey of a thousand miles starts with a first step”.
Read more about the banana cultivar checklist on ProMusa website
Photo: Bunch of Ruhuvia Chichi, a banana variety cultivated in the Solomon Islands.
Credit: Gabriel Sachter-Smith, courtesy of Musarama