This image of ‘Glass Gem’ corn has sort of exploded on Milkwood Permaculture’s Facebook page, with over 3,000 “likes” and 10,000 “shares.” I just hope there’s enough seed out there.
Glass gem corn goes viral
Mapping some life
Yes, indeed Map of Life is indeed live, as we Nibbled yesterday, at least for amphibians, birds, reptiles, mammals and fish. 1 MoL pulls in point data from GBIF, of course, but also polygon distribution maps from IUCN, user-uploaded maps, local inventories from various sources and the regional checklists from WWF. That’s a whole load of different sources, formats and types of data to be served up in one googly visualization. Quite impressive. Which does make one wonder why one is reduced to screengrabs to share the results, as for example below for the yak and Dall’s Sheep, two of the high altitude mammals we featured a few days back. No doubt they’ll sort that out.
And we of course also look forward to the inclusion of plants, and in particular crop wild relatives, in the near future. We can point them to some data sources for those…
Featured: Plant Genetic Resources Newsletter
Peterson Wambugu misses the Plant Genetic Resources Newsletter and doesn’t care who knows it:
We are still mourning the death of PGRN. What became of efforts to resurrect it which had been initiated about 2 years ago. The Newsletter was a vital source of information on genetic resources. We really miss it.
So how about it, guys? How are those plans for resurrection going?
Arnold Arboretum goes mobile
The Arnold Arboretum has a nifty new app which lets you access information about individual plants right on your mobile phone as you walk around the grounds. And that of course includes lots of crop wild relatives…
Highest altitude sheep
The Biodiversity Heritage Library has this nice montage on its Facebook page, where it asks the question: “Which of the species pictured here lives at the highest altitude of all grazing herds?” You can vote here. I think the answer is the only non-wild sheep of the four, but it could be a trick question.