The New Scientist’s blogger manages to confuse the Svalbard Global Seed Vault with the Millennium Seed Bank. I guess it was inevitable.
LATER: No, it wasn’t me that left that first, rude comment! And I’m offended that you think it might have been.
Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Crops, animals, wild relatives ...
Fresh Nibbles: February 14, 2012
: <- click to comment- World Bank runs competition to develop climate change app. CCAFS surrenders.
- ICRISAT launches Center of Excellence on Climate Change Research for Plant Protection. CCAFS surrenders.
- Britain’s National Fruit Collection gets grafted.
- COGENT looks for validation.
- Everybody loves timelapse.
- A seed catalogue round-up.
- “True grits“. Worthy, of course, but basically I love the title.
- Not sure why news of a website for the Biofortification Conference held in November 2010 just popped up, but it did.
- Know any good, young, committed, practical, gung-ho, field-tempered, agricultural Norman Borlaug clones? The World Food Prize wants to hear from you.
- The Millennium Seed Bank has a blog. Welcome, seed-dudes!
Nibbles Archive: All that condensed goodness.
And easy access to the Brainfood Archive.
Featured Comment: February 11, 2012
SLNRao regrets the mistakes of the past, but sees a bright future ahead for grasspea, and its relatives:
Looking at the likely benefits of Homoarginine on the cardiovasculature and emerging concepts on ODAP itself I am of the firm belief that grass pea in coming years will turn into a rich man’s pulse.
- February 14, 2012: Mike Jackson commented on The Origins of some basic mistakes about genebanks
- February 13, 2012: fritzi cohen commented on Online Biodiversity Heritage Library has agrobiodiversity too
- February 13, 2012: Gregory Vaughan commented on Not all Andean tubers are potatoes
- February 12, 2012: michael bennett commented on Erna Bennett: more on this unique person
- February 12, 2012: R Hardwick commented on Nibbles: Cover crops, Barley tempeh, Irish biodiversity, Veg research, Landwirtschaft in einer anderen Dimension, Farmers Markets
- February 11, 2012: Kenneth Welles commented on Giant swamp taro analyzed
- February 9, 2012: SLNRao commented on Debating the future of grasspea breeding
- February 8, 2012: Clare Trivedi commented on Nibbles: Mike Jackson blog, Philippines genebank fire, Ancient garden, USA maps, Horse domestication, Gnats, Livestock training, Chocolate, Epigenetics, Indian nutritional security, Kew fund, GM bananas, Reconciling databases
- February 7, 2012: Ola Westengen commented on Cotton doyen passes away
- February 7, 2012: Jacob commented on Nibbles: Musa taxonomy kerfuffle, Vouchers, Foodies, Aroid roundup, MAS is ok, Sierra Leone conservation
- Brainfood: Chicken domestication, Financial crisis and conservation, Cucurbit domestication, Tamarind future, Biofortification via bacteria, Cowpea nutritional composition, Roman bottlegourd, Noug, Rice blast diversity, Pearl millet domestication, Cacao genotyping, Organic ag, Marcela, In situ vs ex situ, Artocarpus roots
- Darwin Day 2012: b’lieve I’m fixing to live
- Are you a graduate student interested in organic plant breeding and seed systems?
- New Plant Hardiness Zone Map ready for prime time
- How to solve global hunger and malnutrition
- Online Biodiversity Heritage Library has agrobiodiversity too
- Next-generation sequencing and genebanks: a teaser
- Cotton doyen passes away
- Kermit sings the malnutrition blues
- Consolidation in the seed industry
- Germplasm documentation is a two way street
- How grafting a plum tree led to an obsession
- Using data to inform nutrition security policy
- The quinoa story: it’s complicated
- Forests at your service: lessons from Kibale
- Breadfruit roundup
- Not all Andean tubers are potatoes
- Yemen spatial data online, sort of
- CGIAR research on Cassava Brown Streak Disease
- Ground-truthing SPAM
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I just posted a comment to the New Scientist article to try to clarify some of the mix-ups between the Svalbard Global Seed Vault and the Millennium Seed Bank.
This is my second entry on this thread. In my first I said I had “just posted” a comment to the New Scientist article on the New Scientist blog. Lest anyone think I posted the one Luigi refers to as “rude,” I did not. I posted another comment, detailed but polite (at least it was intended to be polite), but New Scientist has not yet put it up. When you post there, or try to, you get a notice saying the blogger will review comments before they go up. I guess we’re still in the review phase.
In any case, let me reiterate here that the Svalbard Global Seed Vault (dubbed the “Doomsday Vault” by the media) is NOT in financial trouble. Not at all. For more information, check out: http://www.croptrust.org. There have been some reports (such as the New Scientist piece in question) about the Millennium Seed Bank experiencing some financial constraints, but I really don’t know about this and thus cannot comment. Their website is at http://www.kew.org/msbp. Needless to say, these are two different and institutionally independent facilities, in two different places, with two different but ultimately complementary functions.