What with all the brouhaha over not merely the First Organic Garden but also the First Dog, our chums over at InfoFarm have turned their far-sighted historical eyes on other, more productive, animals that have graced the White House lawns. I have just one piece of advice for Michelle; sheep once destroyed a couple of years worth of pea-breeding for me, and even a small herd of beeves is hard to fence out of a garden.
Nibbles: Japan, Bananas, GMO, Bees, Squirrels, Mangroves, Climate change and indigenous people, Goji, Svalbard, Heirloom rice, Dataporn
- Japan’s unemployed end up farming.
- Somewhat uninformed comments about the perfection of the banana.
- “…traditional genetic crosses outperform genetically modified crops by a wide margin.”
- Alice Waters takedown.
- Brits throw money at bees.
- Red squirrel missing link found through DNA fingerprinting. Red squirrel pie, anyone? Ok ok, make it grey.
- Mexican mangroves in trouble.
- “Indigenous Peoples have contributed the least to the global problem of climate change but will almost certainly bear the greatest brunt of its impact.”
- Go go goji.
- Secretary General of the Nordic Council of Ministers and former Icelandic Prime Minister waxes lyrical about genebanks.
- So there’s a Carolina Gold Rice Foundation. No, not Golden Rice. Via.
- Help the Biodiversity Heritage Library decide on a citation format. Or not. whatever.
Scientia pro publica
GrrlScientist launched Scientia pro Publica a couple of weeks ago, and yesterday saw the second edition. SPP, to save digits, is a carnival of general science blogging that goes some way to replacing Tangled Bank, which seems to have gone extinct in a burst of random inactivity. As its title proclaims, SPP is Science for the People, and as GrrlScientist, who I guess felt the lack of Tangled Bank more acutely than the rest of us slobs, says, it exists to celebrate and “to promote the value of communicating science, nature and medicine with the public”.
There’s not a whole heap of agricultural stuff in there, apart from our recent post on heirloom tomatoes. I’m not going to whinge about that, as I now realize that we’ve got your all day, every day carnival of agricultural biodiversity right here. That said, there are a couple of posts that interested me. There’s Kelsey’s post on what happens to cigarette butts, ideal fodder for quiet moments in an awkward conversation. And there’s Tim’s post on triage in conservation which — wouldn’t you know it? — has nary a word on agriculture or crop wild relatives. (Oh dear, I seem to have whinged.)
Bees for Development
A new web site — beesfordevelopment.org — is your one-stop-shop for information about beekeeping anywhere in the world. The site recently announced new funding from the Wales for Africa Fund of the Welsh Assembly Government and the Rowse Family Trust that is allowing it to offer a specific African Beekeeping Information Portal. You need to register, which is a minor inconvenience, but I’ll bet there are lots of goodies once you are in.
Featured: Maps
Meike, on GMO introgression “risk” mapped:
We have not only uploaded the maps … but also the raw data that we have used for mapping the distributions of the crop wild relatives (as grid, Google Earth kml, and excel files). So before searching GBIF, SINGER and other online databases: you might save yourself some (a lot!) time if you have a look here first, because we have already done this for most of the wild relatives of 20 different crops!