Author: Luigi Guarino

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Mapping America

So there I was Scooping away, and what should turn up among the stuff I follow, and almost side by side on the screen to boot? Well, this map of obesity rates and farmer markets in the USA:

And, I kid you not, this map of food insecurity in, you guessed it, the USA.

Eyeballing does suggest a certain association between obesity and food insecurity, doesn’t it? Talk about the double burden of malnutrition. Oh the fun one could have mixing and matching such maps, and the no doubt dozens of others that also exist out there, documenting the geographic distribution of McDonald’s, organic farms, drunkenness, gyms, pet ownership, house prices, fizzy drink consumption, weed busts…

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How to react to emergencies

From early 2000, various agencies and individuals involved in livestock relief work began to question the quality and professionalism of their interventions.

Wow, thanks for sharing. Anyway, out of that crisis of self-esteem was LEGS born, the Livestock Emergency Guidelines and Standards. It’s not immediately clear to me after a brief browse of the website to what extent agrobiodiversity considerations come into these standards and guidelines, but I’ll explore some more and get back to you. Anyone out there aware of a similarly formalized initiative for seeds? It’s not as if guidelines for seed interventions are not needed. But they may be there already for all I know, embedded in the WFP and FAO seed relief playbooks.

LATER: And indeed they are. Good to know. Thanks to Tom Osborn from FAO.

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Crop wild relatives of the USA

I’ve just come across the Jepson Flora Project, which

brings together all of the floristic references and data of the Jepson Herbarium. Resources of the Flora Project are directly linked the the Consortium of California Herbaria, CalPhotos, the California Native Plant Society, California Exotic Pest Plant Council, USDA-Plants database, and many other external sites. The Friends of the Jepson Herbarium help the Jepson Flora project carry out its work.

It doesn’t look particularly nice, but I do like the idea of aggregating all kinds of information about each taxon, like Helianthus californicus for instance, via the Jepson Online Interchange. From that admittedly ugly page you can dig deeper, and for example get a digest of taxonomic, distribution and phenology information based on specimens from members of the Consortium of California Herbaria. They don’t make it particularly easy for you 1 but you can, wonder of wonders, even export the location data to Google Earth, where you can mess with it as you wish.

I wonder how many other US states have something similar. And whether all their data on crop wild relatives could then automagically be aggregated up to the national level. Colin, are you there?

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Survey on African orphan crops

Danny posted the following recently on the “Biodiversity for Food and Nutrition” Yahoo Group. I couldn’t find it anywhere else online, so he may have got it by email, I’m not sure. He did ask for it to be more widely disseminated, so here goes. We have mentioned the African Orphan Crop Consortium here before, mainly, if memory serves, to question whether sequencing the genome of said crops was necessarily the best way to spend $40 million. But then we would, wouldn’t we.

“The African Orphan Crop (AOC) consortium had a successful launch at the Clinton Global Initiative in September and the Beijing Genomic Institute has already started work on sequencing winter-thorn acacia (Faidherbia albida). 2 After gathering wonderful feedback from our meeting this summer, we are now conducting a survey to guide the next steps of the project. Via the survey, you are invited to contribute your knowledge and opinions to inform the selection process for the first 20-25 crops that the consortium will genetically sequence. We deeply appreciate your willingness to share insights with this project and would encourage you to forward the survey to others in your network who might like to participate.

The results of this survey will be used by the consortium to inform a process for prioritizing which crops will be initially selected for genetic sequencing, assembly, and annotation by the consortium. As discussed this summer, once this information is developed, it will be placed into the public domain, and plant breeding programs will be established to support development of these crops including the training of 750 plant scientists in Africa. Ultimately, we would like to sequence all of the appropriate crops on this list, and we believe that the momentum generated by the first set of sequenced crops will attract additional interest and funding.