- CGIAR Research Programme on Roots, Tuber and Bananas gets a blog to go with its Facebook page and Twitter feed.
- Coconut clones? I don’t think so.
- Rice yield gene? I don’t think so.
- NY Times hosts a debate on conservation, and genebanks get a look-in.
- Mongolia’s reindeer herders get some advice.
- “My great grandfather’s legacy is something I grew up knowing and respecting, but my parents’ conservation ethic is something that I have always lived.”
- Marine reserves can be good for fish. And abalone?
Maps of Peruvian maize races
A very attractive map of the races of Maize found in Peru posted on Facebook sent me scurrying for the source. Turns out it was put out by the Ministry of the Environment last year. Here it is:
Much prettier than another version that one can also find online:
Of course, these types of maps underplay the diversity that you can find in any one locality within Peru, which can also be considerable. Nice to look at nonetheless.
Featured GCP RSS battle
Antonia continues a metaphor, and asks for opinions on GCP’s RSS feeds.
It’s a new website, so still lots of construction debris flying and lying about, and gaping holes here and there, but we’re working on it as we go along… Will be interesting to hear the views of others on RSS.
Let her have it here.
Nibbles: Wild goat, Heirlooms, Queen’s garden, Baobabs, Bison demise, Friendly yeast, Peruvian potatoes, Saline rice
- Old goat redux.
- A really nothing piece in the Washington Post about heirlooms.
- This is more like it: take home the Queen’s heirlooms. Well, almost.
- Here’s a baobab truly worthy of a factsheet.
- It was international trade that wiped out the bison.
- Fundamentals of On-Farm Plant Breeding Course: The Video.
- Another use for yeast.
- The Parque de la Papa highlighted. But doesn’t say seeds are even going to Svalbard.
- Salinity tolerance in rice: in Goa, and at IRRI.
Mapping cropland one more time
More cartographic busy-ness from IFPRI. They’re mapping cropland, and need your help to validate the results. That’s because the available maps sometimes disagree. And I’m not even entirely sure they’ve looked at all the maps that are out there. What about IWMI‘s stuff? Or FAO‘s? Or even ESRI’s pretty, but pretty useless, recent offering? I expect most of these use the same raw data anyway. So it’s probably a good idea to try to sort it all out with a bit of crowd-sourced ground-truthing. But I do wonder whether those citizen scientists are looking at extra things, beyond just verifying whether they’re standing in cropland or forest. Like gender, for example. Other bits of IFPRI would probably find that interesting, and would even be able to tell them how to do it.