ing a genetic diversity study, which will give them more details, including whether or not the plants are part of a new species. "The idea is that we'll find out which plants have unique genetic characteristics, and then we'll go back and get the live material of those plants so that we can propagate them," says Emma Bladyka, coffee science manager of the SCAA and a member of the expedi- tion team. The trip to collect live material is scheduled to take place in November or December, during the plants' fruiting cycle.
INTO THE UNKNOWN: Timothy Schilling, leader of World Coffee Research's venture into South Sudan's Boma Plateau, holds clippings from the wild coffee plants found by the team.
The inspiration for the journey was a 1942 paper titled "The
Wild Arabica Coffee on the Boma Plateau, Anglo-Egyptian Sudan" by botanist A.S. Thomas, in which he documented his discovery of Arabica plants in the area. The research team used Thomas' paper as a resource, but they discovered a landscape different from the one he documented. "He described the forest from the botanical point of view, and it had changed dramatically as a result of cli- mate change over those 80 years that had gone by," says Schilling. But there was a silver lining in the fact that the coffee plants remained while so many other things had changed. "It probably increases our chance of attaining genes with some kind of toler- ance to those higher temperatures and that particular climate
continued on page 22 freshcup.com July 2012 21
EMMA BLADYKA/SCAA