Talk:Vavilov s.n., Gui-Akhen (1924)
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Discussion
Evidentiary scope
The specimen is a plant grown in 1926 from seed Vavilov gathered at Gui-Akhen in 1924, not a plant collected in Afghanistan. It documents that seed lot and the population it was taken from only through that grow-out. Neither the paper nor Tropicos says how the plants at Gui-Akhen were grown or used, so the accession is classified Other even though the paper places var. afghanica among domesticates. Its importance is nomenclatural: it fixes the application of a name. No conservation priority is assigned, and no living seed lot from Vavilov's 1924 Afghan collection has been found in the VIR, GLIS or GRIN catalogues.
Label reading
No image of the WIR sheet's label has been read. The only image is the paper's Figure 5a, a photograph of the pressed branch on a grey ground, with no label in view. The label text in the article is the paper's (labeled Cannabis sativa, WIR 609, 3945) and Tropicos's, as GBIF publishes it. The Tropicos specimen page (101275983) is a JavaScript application that returns no specimen data without a browser session, and VIR's own herbarium database (db.vir.nw.ru) did not answer, so neither was read.
Georeferencing
No coordinate is asserted. Gui-Akhen and Qala-i Murvardar were not found in the gazetteers searched, and the material is a grow-out. Under the wiki's practice for reproductions, a grow-out carries no coordinate, so that a population keeps one map point. The province field takes Ghazni Province, the paper's present-day attribution.
Editorial treatment
The sheet is a grow-out voucher, so the accession type is Reproduction. No accession of the 1924 seed sample exists, so no parent accession is set. The collection date is 1924, the year Vavilov gathered the seed; the grow-out year, 1926, is stored as the sample harvest date, the field the wiki uses for the year a reproduction was grown. The title takes s.n. and the locality because neither the paper nor Tropicos gives a collector number. WIR 609, 3945, the paper's citation of the sheet, is stored as the catalogue number; Tropicos does not carry it and the paper does not say which number is which. The second Gui-Akhen sheet shares the 609 and differs in the second number (7380). Small and Cronquist (1976, p. 429) cite the lectotype of var. kafiristanica as Vavilov Inst. Herb. # 3952, from seeds sown in 1927 of Vavilov 599, and the label of that sheet carries № 599 beside the name, so the first number of the pair is Vavilov's seed sample and the second the herbarium's sheet. Read the same way, 609 is the Gui-Akhen seed sample, and 3945 and 7380 are two sheets grown from it, at Maikop in 1926 and at Kamenno-Stepnaya in 1925; that is why the article calls the second sheet one from the same seed lot. The reading does not hold for every number in the 2020 list: 607 appears both on a sheet from Asadabad (WIR 607, 3954) and on one from Kafiristan (LE 607, 5667). The 1925 Kamenno-Stepnaya sheet is a separate grow-out and is not drafted here. The scientific name field takes the name of which the specimen is the type, with McPartland and Small as determiners.
Vavilov's 1926 account, read in the OCR text of the Internet Archive scan of Studies on the origin of cultivated plants (item tsentryproiskhoz00vavi, English summary p. 227; Russian text p. 114), places the plants he named f. afghanica on the river Kunar, between Chekosarai and Jalalabad, among wild hemp, in 1924. Gui-Akhen lies on the road between Ghazni and Kandahar, not on the Kunar. The paper does not discuss the difference, and the scan's page images were not inspected.
Source discrepancies
- Where the seed was grown. The article places this sheet's grow-out at Maikop in 1926. The supplementary file's general account (p. 21) says Serebriakova cultivated Vavilov's germplasm at the Kamenno-Stepnaya Experiment Station and prepared voucher specimens; its list of specimens (p. 79) gives both the Maikop sheet (WIR 609, 3945) and a second Gui-Akhen sheet grown at Kamenno-Stepnaya in 1925 (WIR 609, 7380). The two statements describe two grow-outs of one seed lot and do not conflict.
- Name. Tropicos: Cannabis sativa f. afghanica Vavilov. Paper: the specimen is labelled Cannabis sativa; it is the neotype of var. afghanica.
- Protologue locality. Vavilov (1926): the Kunar between Chekosarai and Jalalabad. Neotype: Gui-Akhen, on the road between Ghazni and Kandahar.
Source citations remain in the article. Éloise 04:33, 7 October 2026 (+07)