- GIBF taxonomy is broken. We’re doomed. No, but it can be fixed. Phew.
- Maybe start with a unique identifier for taxonomists? Followed by one for genebank accessions… Yeah. Right.
- Domesticating animals won’t save them. And more on the commodification of wildlife. Is that even a word?
- Geomedicine is here. Can geonutrition be far behind? We’re going to need better maps, though.
- Saving heirlooms, one bright student at a time.
- “Botanists Make Much Use of Time.” If you can get beyond the title, there’s another, quite different, but again quite nice, seed saving story on page 3.
- “Why aren’t these plants the poster children [for plant conservation]?” You tell me.
- Or, instead of doing something about it, as above, we could have a week of Collective Rice Action 2012.
- You can park your sourdough here, sir.
- How Thoreau is helping boffins monitor phenology. But there’s another way too.
- “She drinks coffee. She farms coffee. She studies coffee.” Wild coffee.
- Massive meet on the Rambo Root. Very soon, in Uganda.
- Ketchup is from China? Riiiight. Whatever, who cares, we have the genome!
- And in other news, there are truffles in Qatar. But maybe not for long.
- The weirdness of cashews.
- The normalcy of home gardens as a source of food security — in Indonesia.
- Ok, then, the weirdness of oolong tea.
- Aha, gotcha, the normalcy of office bacterial floras! Eh? No, wait…
Agrobiodiversity education in context
A piece on “Generating the next generation” by Nigel Chaffey in his latest, always indispensable, Plant Cuttings had me trawling around for an hour or so last night amid botanical teaching resources, looking for stuff that might be relevant to agricultural biodiversity. It’s not a great haul, alas.
Teaching Tools in Plant Biology, published by the American Society of Plant Biologists, does have Genetic Improvements in Agriculture, but it’s behind a subscription wall. The American Society of Plant Biologists has pages of resources for K-12 and higher education, but the focus seems to be on biotechnology. Fortunately, the Plant Science TREE (Tool for Research Engaged Education), from the Gatsby Plant Science Summer Schools, does have a useful, freely available section on Plants and People.
I was also momentarily encouraged by seeing an old friend posing in his rice genebank on the homepage of Science & Plants for Schools website:
But the caption he is lumbered with is, weirdly, about the role of plant sciences in “developing cures for diseases.” And anyway nothing happens when you click on him. However, feeding the world is also mentioned (phew), and I was in the end able to find something on genebanks and plant breeding. I wouldn’t call the coverage comprehensive, though. Nor systematically presented.
There is, of course, a place for teaching resources specifically for agrobiodiversity, but one would like to see the subject a little better integrated into the wider plant sciences education universe. Wouldn’t one? Well, not if there are many students like Katie DeGroot.
Sunflower guru bags medal
Plant scientist Loren Rieseberg awarded Linnean Society's Darwin-Wallace medal #linneansociety
— Sandra Knapp (@SandyKnapp) May 24, 2012
I don’t see it on its website yet, but the Linnean Society of London has just awarded the prestigious Darwin-Wallace Medal to Loren Rieseberg, according to Twitter traffic. Dr Riesberg is an expert on sunflower genetics and evolution, and has done much pioneering work on the wild relatives. As luck would have it, I interviewed him recently about his work, and you can listen to the result here. Congratulations to Loren.
Nibbles: Traditional medicine, Agroforestry, IK and adaptation, Paprika, Sustainability, Wheat, Rape, Wild foods, Beetroots, Potatoes, Curcurbits, Guar bonanza, Shipwrecked nuts
- Kenyan herbal medicines in the spotlight.
- Kenyan indigenous trees in the spotlight. The intersection of those two sets would be interesting to explore.
- And then if you mash it up with this…
- … you might still never predict rural Malawi to explode with interest in paprika.
- And yet, (a small bit of) rural America embraces (a version of) sustainability.
- While Bangladeshi farmers embrace participatory wheat variety selection. No idea what they found; the link there is down.
- Next up, participatory selection for efficient use of phosphorus by rape?
- This week’s super-modern chef sourcing strange stuff from the semi-wild gets it in New Jersey.
- Beetroot diversity. Ignore the recipes; focus on the chart of nutrition; has that research been published?
- As for potatoes, the People’s Plot thrives on Olympic glory.
- Quick now: what links Sicily to Kenya? Both make meals of cucurbit leaves!
- OK clever clogs: what links a neglected legume with destructive energy recovery practices? Fracking guar gum, that’s what! (h/t BPA.)
- Nuts, isn’t it? Anyone up for sequencing some 16th century coconuts?
A roadmap to better mapping
Geographers and cartographers often use 2-3 three different software packages for data analysis: they will probably never settle around one tool, online at that, and create a ‘community’ of users there. Instead, the NGOs interested in such a tool should rather offer geo-info advice and look at light open-source GIS software to distribute: how many development workers in the field have had difficulties with the (basic) tabular conversions associated with GPS data? Many many me thinks.
That’s Cédric Jeanneret-Grosjean on online mapping resources. What he’s saying is that they, er, should not be online. Bold. Very bold. But a model that has in fact been followed, at least for the spatial analysis of biodiversity, agricultural and otherwise. And with some success. Maybe time for the crop distribution modellers to try it?
Let’s remember this is important. We’re not just arguing about how to make prettier maps. Identifying what constraints are going to be most significant, when, where in the world, for each crop, is going to be crucial in setting breeding agendas for the next 20 years and more. Breeders need to be able to explore and interrogate these future suitability maps, and explain what they get out of them to their bosses and the policy-makers above them. It’s important to make them as accessible and easy to use as possible. What we have at the moment is not fit for purpose.