- Mike Jackson gets himself a pulpit. Welcome to the blogosphere, Mike!
- More on the Filipino ex-genebank.
- What they grew in an ancient Israelite garden. Can they really tell Citrus species apart from their pollen?
- More American maps to mashup with obesity and food insecurity: land use, renewable energy sources…. I do hope someone is keeping track. Even of the more esoteric stuff, of course, like the names of softdrinks.
- Yet more on horse domestication.
- Another organic farming externality for your consideration. Thanks, Robert.
- ILRI gets innovative on this whole training thing.
- “The future of chocolate” revealed.
- Boffins look at fossil bison epigenetics to investigate adaptation to climate change. What will they think of next. Well, applying it to chickens, for a start.
- Other boffins move potato anti-nematode genes into bananas. No word on the epigenetics of it all.
- Indian report on how to strengthen role of agriculture in nutrition.
- Kew has money for fieldwork.
- Cleaning messy taxonomic data. Useful in Genebank Database Hell?
Kew is paying for collecting and says:
“The other part of each seed collection can be kept in the country of origin and used for any aspect of plant conservation, species re-introduction, habitat restoration, sustainable use or research.” But the Kew people do not say who will own the Kew duplicate, nor what the rules for commercial use of their sample will be. They better sort this out first or they will have the same problems we crop genetic resource people have been having over the past thirty years.
I know it may be a little buried in the Kew website but we have a very well-established Policy on Access to Genetic Resources and Benefit Sharing which covers all aspects of acquisition, use and supply of plant material. The Fieldwork Fund will work within this policy as does all of Kew’s projects. Have a look at this page and the link to the policy from it. We do cover this briefly in the Fieldwork Fund manual but maybe we should include more detail next time we update.