- IFPRI and ILRI put out new free tool on documenting gender and assets data for programme evaluations. Apparently, crop diversity not considered much of an asset.
- The pendulum swings on slash-and-burn? One can hope.
- Different goats sound different. Well there’s a thing.
- Denver Botanic Gardens explains how to share herbarium information. CWRs, take note.
- The ITPGRFA gets itself some RSS feeds.
- And WorldFish a podcast.
- Farming for booze? Start of a series at Scientific American blogs. Can you say “contentious”?
Double grained rice finally out in the open
A small group of farmers in Bangladesh were secretly and sacredly nurturing in field the unique rice variety (or species!) that has two (sometime three) grains in a rice seed. It has not been so far noticed that this type of rice exists in any other country of the world.
That’s from Krisoks’ Blog over at Eldis Communities. Where you can also see photos. 1 Has anyone seen this elsewhere?
Collecting Missions Repository gets an upgrade
I don’t want to get a reputation as a curmudgeonly old coot 2, so let me grasp an opportunity that has fallen into my lap to trumpet a small but significant improvement in conditions down in Genebank Database Hell.
I have on occasion noted that if you wanted to share a link to one of the historical collecting mission reports catalogued in the Collecting Missions Repository, you wouldn’t be able to. No permalink, see? You had to provide the code number of the collecting mission and leave your interlocutor to do the rest, as we did in a recent post on wild Brassica, for example.
No longer. I have been informed, and have verified the fact, that each report now has a handy permalink, reachable from the metadata page.
Let me be the first to congratulate the developers. Would that the folks at Climate Analogues were so obliging…
NGS and genebanks free for a limited time only
Quick, the AmJBot Special Issue on the applications of next-generation sequencing in botany is officially out, and some of the papers are actually free! Including the one on genebanks. And yes, I haven’t forgotten I promised to blog about it. But there’s rather a lot of it to digest…
Nibbles: ICT, New institute, Brit apples, Coconut embryos, Farm cinema, Seeds, Southern obesity, Biofortification, Prize, Kew
- World Bank runs competition to develop climate change app. CCAFS surrenders.
- ICRISAT launches Center of Excellence on Climate Change Research for Plant Protection. CCAFS surrenders.
- Britain’s National Fruit Collection gets grafted.
- COGENT looks for validation.
- Everybody loves timelapse.
- A seed catalogue round-up.
- “True grits“. Worthy, of course, but basically I love the title.
- Not sure why news of a website for the Biofortification Conference held in November 2010 just popped up, but it did.
- Know any good, young, committed, practical, gung-ho, field-tempered, agricultural Norman Borlaug clones? The World Food Prize wants to hear from you.
- The Millennium Seed Bank has a blog. Welcome, seed-dudes!