Author: Luigi Guarino

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Plant Breeding Electronic Journal Club launched

Just in from GBIP.

The GIPB Knowledge Resource Center is launching the Plant Breeding Electronic Journal Club, a virtual place that allows communities to meet and critically evaluate plant breeding and related fields’ articles in the scientific literature.

This e-Journal Club is directed to professionals and students interested in discussing relevant plant breeding themes and issues.   Its majors objectives are to help improve skills of understanding and debating current topics of interest to plant breeding and to promote intellectually stimulating and  professionally rewarding exchange with colleagues from around the world.

This e-Journal Club will use Fireboard, a forum component fully integrated to the GIPB website, which allows implementation of many e-Journal Club groups simultaneously. Dr. Fred Bliss kindly agreed to serve as the convener of this first GIPB e-Journal Club, which will discuss the article “Quantitative  Genetics, Genomics, and the Future of Plant Breeding” by Dr. Bruce Walsh.

In order to participate you just need to follow the instructions in the front page of the GIPB website.  Registration is now opened and the e-Journal Club will start on Wednesday, 6 August 2008.

Please, note that discussion in this first e-Journal Club will be held in English, but proposals of conveners willing to start e-Journal Clubs in other languages can be sent to gipb@fao.org.

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Nibbles: Qat, Tomato, Climate change squared, Documentation, Food diaspora, Mapping Africa, Gout, Chicken origins, HealthMap, Olive, Crop mixtures

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Nibbles: Diversified farming, Appropriate crops, Alcohol, IPR

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Mangroves all over the place

For some reason, there’s been a spate of mangrove stories lately. First there was a PNAS paper about the value of Mexican mangroves. That’s behind a paywall, but it was enthusiastically picked up, including by National Geographic and SciDevNet. ((Not to mention Kazinform.)) The latter followed-up with a story about mangrove planting not being done right in the Philippines, based on a paper in Wetlands Ecology and Management. That was also widely picked up, and occasionally given a local slant, as for example in Abu Dhabi. Yesterday there was a story from Fiji. And there have been questions in the Pakistani parliament.

Maybe the media interest has to do with the International Wetlands Conference, which just closed in Brazil. Predictably, participants

…warn[ed] against creating energy and food croplands at the expense of natural vegetation and of carelessly allowing agriculture to encroach on wetlands, which causes damage through sediment, fertilizer and pesticide pollution.

But of course there’s a lot of agriculture that takes place within wetlands:

A recent study shows a large wetland in arid northern Nigeria yielded an economic benefit in fish, firewood, cattle grazing lands and natural crop irrigation 30 times greater than the yield of water being diverted from the wetland into a costly irrigation project.

And climate change is expected to have a devastating effect:

According to South African research, an estimated 1 to 2 million rural poor in that country alone could be displaced as wetlands dry up, placing further strain on urban centres to create accommodation and employment.