VIR’s Pavlovsk Research Station, a set on Flickr.
Still all to play for at Pavlovsk.
Plantwise Knowledge Bank: The Video
The Plantwise knowledge bank will be a comprehensive global resource bringing together the best worldwide knowledge on crops, pests, diseases and weeds.
Well, it’s not exactly the citizen science advocated by some of our readers, 1 but this is an interesting exercise in a sort of crowdsourcing. One hopes that variety-level information on the crop will be recorded at the same time as all that pest and disease stuff. And that the whole lot won’t be behind some paywall.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NfEfxLcgHk4&feature=player_embeddedNibbles: Barley genetics, CCAFS, VIR, Gardens of Adonis, Traditional Knowledge, Safety duplication, Wild pig,
- 10MB worth of proceedings of the Barley Genetics Symposium from ICARDA.
- So, what will this CCAFS do anyway?
- Russia offers VIR to the world. Again.
- Adonis, Sappho and lettuce, all in one post.
- Modern science needs traditional knowledge. And a fish needs a bicycle.
- Global Crop Diversity Trust and Latin American genebanks team up to rescue another bunch of crops: coffee, tomatoes, chillies, beans, squash etc.
- The world’s smallest and rarest wild suid is cute enough, not as cute as pocket pigs.
Serving, protecting, blogging
Our more skeptical readers will probably dispute it, but that’s a shot of this esteemed organ being publicized at the European Plant Genetic Resources Conference 2011, organized by Eucarpia, taking place in Wageningen as I write. 2 Apparently, the massed ranks of genebankers present were encouraged to blog away, echoing our recent exhortation to that effect. Welcome, everyone!
Mapping aid
Thanks to CIAT’s Meike for news that
InterAction has just launched an interactive US Food Security Aid Map that provides detailed project-level information on food security and agriculture work being done by their member NGOs. The site can be browsed by location, sector, organization or project.
Here’s the map of agriculture projects: 3
As coincidence would have it, one of the projects is the orange-fleshed sweet potato work we mentioned in a recent post.
Searching on “agrobiodiversity” yielded nothing, but there were a few hits with “diversification.” Well worth exploring in a bit more detail. If only to identify places where some pre-emptive germplasm collecting might be in order.