- Today in dodgy journalism, part 1: ICRISAT gets a new mandate crop? What was the picture editor thinking. And smoking.
- Today in dodgy journalism, part 2: Two typos in the obsolete name of the CGIAR.
- Dissecting Chinese traditional medicine. Or would that be puncturing?
- Hunter gatherers have special gut bacteria.
- Bees: “That’s the beauty of the research. Because we’re still short on info, everything’s worth knowing about.”
- Maple syrup tasting. Nice gig if you can get it.
- Activist objects to proposed new seed law in Sri Lanka.
- UC Davis wheat geneticist Jorge Dubcovsky wins 2014 Wolf Prize in Agriculture. Congrats.
- Sandy Knapp on what she does all day.
- The future of field guides. Yes, they have one.
- Tapa cloth, in Cologne of all places. Don’t think there were any from Palau, though.
- Abschlusskommuniqué of the Global Forum on Food and Agriculture 2014 supports conservation and use of agricultural biodiversity. Phew.
Nibbles: British foods, NBPGR wheat, CIMMYT wheat, Innovation, Ghana cowpea, Nordic grog, Medicinal purposes, Heirloom chocolate, Grünewoche, Dog genomics, Berry go Round, Broad beans, Ag landscapes, Tea and CC
- Google Map of British protected food names. Where’s fish and chips? Or the cream tea. Japan next?
- Indian genebank in the record books for characterizing wheat.
- And with no help from CIMMYT!
- Getting those damn smallholders to innovate already.
- Ghana gets a new cowpea to innovate with. Well, almost.
- And there I was thinking smallholders had been innovating for thousands of years. Even in the frozen north. Winter may be coming, but we’ve got grog. Which you know is good for you.
- As is chocolate, so go ahead and submit your heirloom cacao beans for evaluation. But don’t be tempted to cheat. We’ll know if you are.
- Oh damn, it’s Green Week.
- The story behind the methods used in a recent paper on dog diversity. Wonkish.
- We seem to have slipped off the Berry Go Round treadmill, which means we missed some gorgeous photos of broad beans.
- And another belated treat: UNESCO’s round up of World Heritage agricultural landscapes.
- …one of which is not tea in China, but maybe it should be, before it’s too late.
Nibbles: Rice show, Central Asian forests, Research archives, Opium, Data stuff, Indian seeds, Ag expansion
- Rice symposium wows Hong Kong.
- Fruits and nuts of Kyrgyzstan.
- Rothamstead’s archives look totally cool.
- One does wonder whether Afghanistan could learn something from Colorado.
- When did continued collaboration become news, CIAT?
- Cherokee continue to save seeds.
- Agricultural expansion a continuing a bad thing for nature.
Filling the gaps in Lacunas
A paper in Biodiversity and Conservation caught my eye: “Lacunas: a web interface to identify plant knowledge gaps to support informed decision-making.” 1 I knew that Brazilian biodiversity researchers had been working hard on bringing their data together, and this sounded like the information was now ready to be put to some use:
SpeciesLink’s thematic network, INCT-Virtual Herbarium of Plants and Fungi and the List of Species of the Brazilian Flora, are used as primary data sources to develop Lacunas, an information system with a public web interface that generates detailed reports of the status of plant species occurrence data. Lacunas also integrates information about endemism, conservation status, and collecting efforts over time.
I couldn’t resist doing a quick roadtest of Lacunas, of course. It’s available in both Portuguese and English, and it has a simple, intuitive interface, so it wasn’t a chore. Naturally I selected a crop wild relative: Oryza grandiglumis (Döll) Prod.
You get a nice map. And a bunch of tables summarizing various statistics (both for the exact species name and for phonetically similar species names, which is a nice touch):
- Number of records per year collected
- Total number of records available in different herbaria in the speciesLink network
- Total number of records available in the speciesLink network by georeferencing status
- Total number of records available in the speciesLink network with distinct geographic coordinates
I grabbed a screenshot of one of the tables, because that was the only way I could see to save the results, and I thought I might blog about Lacunas one day. It was a pity about that saving thing, though, because the statistics the portal provides are genuinely useful in giving an idea of the quality and quantity of the data we have on different species in Brazil. For example, for our wild rice there are 31 records in all, but only 4 have original georeferences. Fortunately, for 15 of those that don’t have original latitude and longitude coordinates, it was possible to infer georeferences from other associated data. But that still leaves a significant number of herbarium specimens which cannot be used in mapping the distribution of the species. Anyway, I left a comment to that effect on the website. Then I moved on to other stuff, and the blogging got pushed down the to-do list, what with one thing and another.
Imagine my surprise then when I got notification of a fix within a couple of days. A fix which allows me to link to a results page, rather than include that clunky screengrab here. And imagine my further surprise when the guy who provided the fix turned out to be an old friend. Small world. Anyway, thanks to Sidnei for the help, and the chat.
Now, it would be great to compare the Lacunas data with those in the Crop Wild Relatives Global Atlas. But first I need to convince the developers of that incredible resource to make sharing results a little easier.
Nibbles: Kangkong, Fun labwork, Breadfruit beer, Saving juniper, Green Week
- Ipomoea aquatica in the news.
- DNA extraction made fun.
- Samoa launches breadfruit beer.
- Gin maker protects his livelihood.
- The Treaty goes to Green Week.