WorldFish has a new blog, focusing on spatial data. It’s only been going a few months, but it looks like it may well have some interesting stuff of relevance to agrobiodiversity. One of its early posts reminded me of something I’ve wanted to do for a while, and that is use Google Trends to look at interest in genebanks. In particular, I wanted to know whether all the news about the Svalbard Global Seed Vault has excited people about genebanks in general. Apparently, not.
The various spikes in interest in Svalbard do not seem to have resulted in increasing searches for “genebank” or “seed bank.” At least not that you can yet see clearly. Here’s hoping…
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It doesn’t show in the picture, but the blue line looks very sad. But is it really reliable, the long trend? The sudden gaps look suspicious.
Wow, that was a great idea. At least ‘seed bank’ is showing a slight upward trend.
With asian people googling Genebank whilst europeans google Seed bank. In Latin America we, surprisingly, got Colombia in the first place googling Genebank…