Coconut palms in Hawaii


My friend and colleague Indrajit Gunasekara, from the University of Hawaii - West Oahu, and currently the most famous collector of coconut varieties in Hawaii, will organize a donation of some of the coconut seedlings he has collected... 
If you know any special coconut variety, please contact Indrajit, He will probably come to see it....
His generous and interesting initiative could fit well with the approach that we have called " delocalized community-based coconut genebank:", and which has already been applied to the Cook Islands by another friend and colleague, Victor Mataora. This was published in 2016 in the website "Coconut planting material for the Pacific region", Cook Island section, as follow:

The expert would like to introduce the new concept of delocalized community-based coconut genebank: Each coconut palm planted in a public place should be from a variety perfectly identified; its identity and its localisation (latitude and longitude, date of planting) should recorded in a database available online. If the Ministry apply this advice, Cook will probably have after ten years the largest coconut genebank in the world – without devoting any dedicated land to this activity. This genebank will be directly available to all citizen who can access information by the online database.

Later it was published again in a chapter of a Australian scientific book:
Bourdeix, R., Adkins, S., Johnson, V., & Perera, L. (2020). In situ and ex situ conservation of coconut genetic resources. In Coconut Biotechnology: Towards the Sustainability of the ‘Tree of Life’ (pp. 51-75). Springer, Cham.

Another important point is that, about 10 years ago, I found information about a coconut genebank in Hawaii, but I lost the data. This genebank seemed particularly important to me because it was the only one in the world to preserve a rare variety of coconut tree from the island of Niuafo'ou in Tonga, the most famous island in the whole Pacific for Polynesians in regarding the coconut tree. Any help in finding the missing information would be particularly welcome.

A nice picture of Malayan Red Dwarf in Hawaii
from the facebook page "Low Bearing Coconut Preservation Mission" 
Click to see all the pictures of this webpage



Notes about Hawaii
Beyond a flourishing coconut grove at the tip of the flat spit of land that marks the southern end of Poka'i Bay stand the ruined walls of Ku'ilioloa Heiau. Unusual in being virtually surrounded by water, this three-tiered structure is said to mark the place where the first coconut tree to be brought from Tahiti was planted in Hawaiian soil. Kamehameha offered sacrifices here before launching his first invasion attempt against Kauai.
Phillip Young created over 30 years on Kauai the largest collection of coconut germplasm in Hawaii. Since the state of Hawaii will difficultly allow any more importation of coconuts into the state this collection on Kauai at Phillip Young's is critical for many reasons. One of those reasons is that it fulfils the mandate that the new generation of productive trees are early bearing dwarfs.

Arthur Hyde Rice

Hawaii 1914-1917 - To meet the demand for coconut oil on the continental United States, Arthur Hyde Rice planted 140,000 coconut palms. The area was named Coconut Grove for the numerous palms. Unfortunately, he planted the wrong variety [?] and suffered severe financial losses. From Hall, TW (1998) The History of Kailua.

R. Bourdeix, section DPP-Hawaii

People also ask
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