Tomato diversity in Google Earth

Here’s a fun thing. There’s a group pool on Flickr, the photo sharing site, called “tomatoes!” ((And also similar pools for lots of other plants.)) All kinds of pictures of all kinds of tomatoes, and very beautiful is all that diversity to look at too. But you can do more. Like for example map where the photos were taken (assuming the photographer uploaded a georeference). Which could give you a snapshot of where tomatoes are grown or consumed — or maybe just particularly loved. You can also generate a kml file. Here’s what you get when you view it in Google Earth:
tomato-europe
Haven’t quite worked it out. This doesn’t seem to be all the georeferenced tomato photos from Europe in the group. Maybe just the latest to be uploaded. But I can’t help thinking this is a great way of displaying the geographic distribution of agricultural biodiversity.

Cooking the books

The news that the DNA in medieval parchments is to be fingerprinted has been making quite a splash. Parchments are made of animal skins, of course, and it seems that it is possible to recover DNA in decent shape — the latest example of archeogenetics. The idea is to produce “a taxonomy of manuscript manufacture,” which must be of tremendous excitement to medievalists. But John Hawks describes another possible application in his anthropological blog that’s more in line with our agrobiodiversity interests here:

…the results may be equally useful for understanding the processes of animal breeding in medieval Europe. Today’s domesticated breeds are a remnant of a much larger diversity of local breeds that once existed. People bred animals both locally by selection and across large regions by introducing favored animals from long distances. Sometimes they favored diversity — and considering the revival of interest in legacy breeds like Highland cattle.

Wish I’d thought of that…