Nibbles: Chocolate, MAS, Cash crops, Medicinal plants, Rice domestication, Cat genome, Banana research, Artichoke history, Root vegetables, Diabetes data, eMonocot, Paris herbarium, Appleseed, Seed saving, Potato safety duplication, Seed atlas, Botanical Jurassic Park, Mapping urban fruit, Midwest road trip, Iraqi marshes, World Digital Library, World Parks Congress, Plant demography

Ok here goes, there’s a week’s work of Nibbles we’ve got to catch up on.
World running out of chocolate! Tell that to Cologne.
Yeah well I prefer tea to cocoa.
Greenpeace: “Smart breeding” will save us, not GMOs. Breeders: All breeding is smart.
Guess the world’s biggest cash crop. Yeah, that one.
Alas, it’s not included in the recent strategy for conserving medicinal plants. Not that it would need conserving.
The domestication of the world’s biggest crop, period. Deconstructed. And if you want to drill down.
And of the world’s biggest fruit.
And of the world’s biggest pet.
And of the world’s most difficult to eat vegetable.
Root “vegetables” made simple. Because winter.
And why you must eat your veggies, including the difficult ones.
Videos on Kew’s monocot database and on the renovation of another famous herbarium.
The real Johnny Appleseed.
But you too can save seeds, just like Johnny.
But don’t forget to safety duplicate, like CIP has done, at Embrapa.
And this shows you what those seeds can look like.
You don’t necessarily need seeds to save plants, though.
Mapping fallen fruit. Because we can.
Road trip!
Boat trip!
Selected Techniques in the Art of Agriculture. From French to Turkish to Arabic. One of many nifty agriculture-related resources in the World Digital Library.
Oh yeah, the IUCN World Parks Congress has been on and its all over the intertubes. Including with neat visualizations, natch.
How many of the species in the COMPADRE database of plant demography information are in protected areas? How many are crop wild relatives? I need an intern.

2 Replies to “Nibbles: Chocolate, MAS, Cash crops, Medicinal plants, Rice domestication, Cat genome, Banana research, Artichoke history, Root vegetables, Diabetes data, eMonocot, Paris herbarium, Appleseed, Seed saving, Potato safety duplication, Seed atlas, Botanical Jurassic Park, Mapping urban fruit, Midwest road trip, Iraqi marshes, World Digital Library, World Parks Congress, Plant demography”

I wonder where Catha edulis would come? It would have to beat the current top crop at about $50 square metre for the bracts only. Catha is a dense perennial shrub harvested for leaves, I think year-round: it could do it. Vanilla vines would be up in the top few for value.

Me again. I think the CIP/Embrapa document says that Embrapa receives its first international germplasm collection duplication. Not so. CIAT sent a duplicate Phaseolus beans collections to Embrapa in the mid 1980s (also to CATIE). But I could be wrong as left CIAT around that time and the dispatch could have been abandoned.

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