Following my earlier post about cartograms, here’s one for the germplasm collections catalogued in SINGER, by country of origin. Thanks to Dr Robert Hijmans of IRRI for the birthday present.

Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Crops, animals, wild relatives ...
by Luigi Guarino on March 25, 2007
Following my earlier post about cartograms, here’s one for the germplasm collections catalogued in SINGER, by country of origin. Thanks to Dr Robert Hijmans of IRRI for the birthday present.

Mark Nesbitt knows who the Director of Agriculture is Tanzania was in 1934:
The sorghum collection – all 956 accessions – was acquired by J.D. Snowden while working on his 1936 book (still in print!) “Cultivated Races of Sorghum”. It’s a perfect example of a collection that 20 years ago would have seemed useless (old seeds, mostly dead) but thanks to new techniques (DNA analysis) suddenly looks very interesting as a record of landrace distribution before the Green Revolution.
So, any gene jockeys out there interested in extracting DNA from old seeds? Just for information, there are 1058 sorghum accessions from Tanzania in Genesys. How much can it cost to run a bunch of microsatellites on 2,000 samples?
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Great stuff.
I would suggest that you include a standard map with the same colours alongside the cartogram to help identify very distorted countries. Would be neat to have the maps linked too, hover the cursor over country A in one map and it get highlighted in both maps.
I always meant to apply it to this type of data too,
http://www.cis.hut.fi/research/som-research/worldmap.html
map regions coloured by similarity and then made into a cartogram
ps. happy birthday?
Oh yes, a self-organizing map of the SINGER data would be interesting. I suppose something like the Vavilovian Centres of Diversity would come out? I believe Robert has a poverty cartogram, but I’m not sure based on what data.
P.S. Thanks!
this seems to correlate with the countries of the CG centers….except the Phillipines. You could think that China would be larger. Turkey and Iran stand out.
Early emergency collecting missions there for wheat and barley?
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