Living Labs videos online

Television for Education-Asia Pacific (TVEAP) has a series of five-minute videos on YouTube highlighting the work of the CGIAR Challenge Program on Water and Food in some of the more important river basins of the world:

With water scarcity emerging as a global concern, we simply cannot continue the water-intense methods of the past. Yet, as human numbers increase, more food needs to be produced with the same — or shrinking — land. This calls for smarter, thriftier ways of using freshwater and increasing water’s productivity in agriculture, without damaging the environment, or undermining food security, jobs or health.

Genebanks not (yet) trendy

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.

trend

Click to enlarge.

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…