Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
“Destruction of economic trees such as shea-nut and dawadawa trees actually deny community members, especially women their source of livelihood. It also restricts the hitherto extensive traditional rearing of animals in the affected communities.”
Bad news alert, from AllAfrica.com.
Jeremy explains Luigi’s overly telegraphic post on seed longevity:
Laconic, possibly to a fault. The point being that Olivia Judson’s normally impeccable science-writing has failed her this once, but comments there are closed, so Luigi is taking the opportunity to set her straight here. If she notices …
From The Guardian‘s science columnist:
…the massive Svalbard Global Seed Vault, built inside a mountain on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, opened its doors last year. Yet there may be little point to such a project if seeds, in general, last only a few years.
If.
Distributed computer projects are taking off in a big way. “Many are run on a volunteer basis, and involve users donating their unused computational power to work on interesting computational problems.” That usually means looking for extraterrestrial life or working out the structure of black holes or proteins while your computer idles away. Herbaria@home is a bit different. When you sign up as a volunteer, you receive scans of herbarium sheets, you digitize the label information, and these data are then added to the herbarium’s information system. Actually, there are other examples of such projects, which use the public’s spare brain-power, as well as their spare computer-power. I wonder if this approach could be used to improve genebank documentation. Perhaps to geo-reference tricky accessions? Or how about to characterize the morphology of different varieties from photos?