You remember Robert’s entry for last year’s competition? Well, now check out this piece from MSNBC. And there’s a video too:
Always nice to see a genebank on the evening news.
CWR and medicinal species in botanic gardens
Suzanne Sharrock of Botanic Gardens Conservation International (BGCI) has left a very interesting comment on our post a couple of day ago about the overlap between wild medicinal plants and wild crop relatives. Rather than letting it languish in obscurity, I’m reproducing it below:
At BGCI we have developed a list of around 3,000 plant species that are used for medicinal purposes. Of these, we know that 1,802 are in cultivation in botanic gardens and this list can be easily extracted from our PlantSearch database. Simply select “medicinal plants” and the list of medicinal plants that are in cultivation in botanic gardens is displayed. On this list, plants that are also CWR are marked (according to a list of CWR genera). If you download the list, it can be easily be manipulated in excel so you can extract those species (164 species) that are both medicinal plants and crop wild relatives and are in cultivation in botanic gardens.
If anyone is interested, we could provide the full list of plants that are on both our medicinal and CWR lists — not just those in cultivation in botanic gardens.
Nibbles: Earthworms, Statistics, Bison, Urban, Cork
- Boffins find lots of cryptic genetic diversity in earthworms.
- China produces half the world’s vegetables?
- Know your bison.
- Flouting Zimbabwe’s laws on urban agriculture to stay alive.
- Cork certification.
Slow Food on the move
The Slow Food movement is evolving, its founder says: “People who sniff a cheese and talk about how it has the most wonderful aroma of horse sweat. Think how incredibly boring we would be if we were still just a gastronomic society.”
New journal on Food Security
The new journal “Food Security: The Science, Sociology and Economics of Food Production and Access to Food” has two aims: (1) to define the constraints that prevent around one billion of the world’s population from accessing an appropriate diet i.e. one that is sufficiently nutritious to allow full development of physical and mental potential and (2) to address the means by which these constraints may be overcome. Food Security will cover the following topics: global food needs, the mismatch between population and the ability to provide adequate nutrition, global food potential, natural constraints to satisfying global food needs, nutrition, food quality and food safety as well as socio-political factors that impinge on the ability to satisfy global food needs. The journal will contain a mixture of original refereed papers, review articles, case studies, commentaries and letters to the editor. The editor-in-chief is Dr. Richard Strange of Birkbeck College, University of London, UK.