- How should journalists report biodiversity loss?
- Ireland maps its threatened species, including a crop wild relative or two.
- Eat like a nomad.
- Why agriculture was such a bad idea.
- “The heightened voyaging from A.D. 1000 to 1450 in eastern Polynesia was likely prompted by ciguatera fish poisoning.”
- Is Floyd Zaiger the most prolific fruit breeder in the world? Read about his “designer fruits.”
- “It is truly the apricots that have kept me interested and focused at this job for the past 22 years.”
- Jordan’s Bedouins struggling to cope.
- Donkeys running for their lives in Ghana.
- Chile’s winemakers move south.
- The continuing success story that is Cuban urban agriculture.
The symbolism of plants
With the forthcoming 12 monthly articles we want to give a certain insight into how former generations and cultures, having far less access to rational and experimental scientific knowledge than modern scientists, tried to explain and interpret their observations in the plant kingdom.
That’s from Riklef Kandeler and Wolfram Ullrich’s introduction to their series on “Symbolism of plants: examples of European-Mediterranean culture presented with biology and history of art” in the Journal of Experimental Botany. 1 It started last January, and each month brings a new plant. June’s installment has just come out. It’s on lilies. No crops, really, though some of the plants treated are used as food (e.g. Crocus). The focus is on plants which carry with them the heaviest symbolic baggage. You can set up an alert with the journal to tell you when the next in the series will come out.
Photos of livestock and people published
Coincidentally, I also heard about another lot of agrobiodiversity photos today. Ellen Geerlings posted an announcement on ELDev about the publication of her book “People and livestock.”
The book contains photos taken over a period of 16 years. It includes 76 pages of photos of livestock keeping in Bangladesh, Cambodia, Cameroon, Egypt, Mexico, India and Wales and more.
You can see the first 15 pages on the publisher’s website. And National Geographic has more photos. Well worth a look.
Prizes for stunning garden photographs
The UK’s International Garden Photographer of the Year award have just been announced. The New Scientist has a nice selection. The competition’s website has all the category winners and finalists. There are some really great photos, including of crop plants. But I was disappointed that few of the photographs celebrated diversity per se, but rather took a somewhat reductionist, or perhaps minimalist, view. Having said that, there were exceptions.
Nibbles: Pathology, Aquaculture
- Local plant clinics are a hit in Uganda.
- African catfish is a hit in Cuba, kinda.