The annual conference of Biodiversity Information Standards (TDWG), this year entitled “e-Knowledge about Biodiversity and Agriculture,” will be on in Montpellier, France from November 9–13, 2009. This is the first time, apparently, that a TDWG conference will deal with agricultural biodiversity informatics as one of its major themes. As ever, if you’re going, we’d love to hear from you.
Mapping banana diseases by phone
…Grameen Foundation, the International Institute for Tropical Agriculture (IITA) and Uganda’s National Agriculture Research Organization (NARO) designed a pilot project to test if data collection and transmission through the use of mobile phones (and GPS units) is a viable alternative to tradition[al] agriculture extension. The project team used identifying, mapping, monitoring and controlling banana disease as a case study to model this new agriculture extension system.
Interesting, no? And, it seems, quite effective. You can read about some of the results at AGCommons. Who’s going to be the first to use mobile phones to map and monitor crop (or crop wild relatives) diversity?
LATER: The BBC has a piece on software for mobiles that will support this kind of application.
Taxonomists trying to be “minimally disruptive”
A recent article in LifeScientist is a fairly conventional look at the eternal struggle for the soul of taxonomy between the morphologists and the gene-jockeys, though admittedly with an Antipodean slant. What makes it particularly interesting for us here is the choice of examples, which include a crop group in Citrus and its allied genera. It seems that molecular work suggests that the ancestors of the Australian genera in the sub-family Aurantoideae may have got there by “trans-oceanic dispersal,” possibly as a result of “cataclysmic events like cyclones.” Which sounds like something I need to find out more about…
Nibbles: Museums
- Natural history collections important in monitoring biodiversity and engaging public interest. Well I never.
Nibbles: Indian potatoes, IUCN report, Climate change and disease
- The history of the potato at Shimla.
- Lots of Mediterranean mammals in trouble, including wild relatives of domesticated species.
- SciDev rounds up the science on climate change and diseases. Human diseases, that is, but much also applies to those of crops and livestock.