- IFAD’s organic Moldovan cheese wins big.
- Advice for Rwandan coffee and banana farmers to cope with climate change.
- Advice from Mexico’s campesinos on how to cope with climate change.
- Do they – or you – need to participate in plant breeding? This toolkit could help.
- These folks don’t … From little corn plants, big efficiencies grow. I think.
- Newly trained press officers to support agriculture on Indian Ocean islands.
- Hurrah! A conference on traditional foods, with street food seminar accompaniment. h/t CFF.
- The diversity of forest peoples, united in their dependence on forests.
- Alternatives to guar: “Even though all the ingredients are acquired from food suppliers, the CleanStim fluid system should not be considered edible.”
Nibbles: Aquatic mapping, Biofortified millet, Indian agriculture, African agriculture, Restoration, Online flora, Farm Bill, Right to Food, Elk farming, Forestry fellowship, Breadfruit, Foods and climate change
- OBIS maps marine organisms. But does it include this data from China?
- Private sector delivers biofortified millet. But will it make it to the wiki for Indian agriculture?
- New paper by APRODEV and PELUM on why CAADP should follow IAASTD. Glossary not included. And more on African agriculture from Gates. Not like this, though.
- Millennium Seed Bank in ecosystem restoration. And a study on ecosystems that are actually going to require less restoration than others.
- Monsanto supports online world flora. What could possibly go wrong? Meanwhile, in the public sector…
- Olivier de Schutter’s recent Right to Food shpiel for IFPRI. LOTS of words. I guess you had to be there.
- Small-scale elk farming primer. Not as crazy as it sounds, but pretty crazy.
- And if you’re a young scientist, from sub-Saharan Africa, and interested in forest genetic resources, well, here’s a fine forestry fellowship opportunity.
- The Bounty Redux. The whole bringing-breadfruit-to-the Caribbean thing seems to be going more smoothly this time.
- Huffington slideshow on the world’s endangered foods.
Nibbles: GIBF, Identifiers, Farming animals, Geomedicine, Seed saving, Seeds of Success, CWRs, CORA 2012, Sourdough culture bank, Phenology, Wild Coffea, Cassava conference, Condiments, Gulf truffles, Cashew nut, Home gardens, Tea, Bacterial diversity
- GIBF taxonomy is broken. We’re doomed. No, but it can be fixed. Phew.
- Maybe start with a unique identifier for taxonomists? Followed by one for genebank accessions… Yeah. Right.
- Domesticating animals won’t save them. And more on the commodification of wildlife. Is that even a word?
- Geomedicine is here. Can geonutrition be far behind? We’re going to need better maps, though.
- Saving heirlooms, one bright student at a time.
- “Botanists Make Much Use of Time.” If you can get beyond the title, there’s another, quite different, but again quite nice, seed saving story on page 3.
- “Why aren’t these plants the poster children [for plant conservation]?” You tell me.
- Or, instead of doing something about it, as above, we could have a week of Collective Rice Action 2012.
- You can park your sourdough here, sir.
- How Thoreau is helping boffins monitor phenology. But there’s another way too.
- “She drinks coffee. She farms coffee. She studies coffee.” Wild coffee.
- Massive meet on the Rambo Root. Very soon, in Uganda.
- Ketchup is from China? Riiiight. Whatever, who cares, we have the genome!
- And in other news, there are truffles in Qatar. But maybe not for long.
- The weirdness of cashews.
- The normalcy of home gardens as a source of food security — in Indonesia.
- Ok, then, the weirdness of oolong tea.
- Aha, gotcha, the normalcy of office bacterial floras! Eh? No, wait…
Nibbles: Traditional medicine, Agroforestry, IK and adaptation, Paprika, Sustainability, Wheat, Rape, Wild foods, Beetroots, Potatoes, Curcurbits, Guar bonanza, Shipwrecked nuts
- Kenyan herbal medicines in the spotlight.
- Kenyan indigenous trees in the spotlight. The intersection of those two sets would be interesting to explore.
- And then if you mash it up with this…
- … you might still never predict rural Malawi to explode with interest in paprika.
- And yet, (a small bit of) rural America embraces (a version of) sustainability.
- While Bangladeshi farmers embrace participatory wheat variety selection. No idea what they found; the link there is down.
- Next up, participatory selection for efficient use of phosphorus by rape?
- This week’s super-modern chef sourcing strange stuff from the semi-wild gets it in New Jersey.
- Beetroot diversity. Ignore the recipes; focus on the chart of nutrition; has that research been published?
- As for potatoes, the People’s Plot thrives on Olympic glory.
- Quick now: what links Sicily to Kenya? Both make meals of cucurbit leaves!
- OK clever clogs: what links a neglected legume with destructive energy recovery practices? Fracking guar gum, that’s what! (h/t BPA.)
- Nuts, isn’t it? Anyone up for sequencing some 16th century coconuts?
A roadmap to better mapping
Geographers and cartographers often use 2-3 three different software packages for data analysis: they will probably never settle around one tool, online at that, and create a ‘community’ of users there. Instead, the NGOs interested in such a tool should rather offer geo-info advice and look at light open-source GIS software to distribute: how many development workers in the field have had difficulties with the (basic) tabular conversions associated with GPS data? Many many me thinks.
That’s Cédric Jeanneret-Grosjean on online mapping resources. What he’s saying is that they, er, should not be online. Bold. Very bold. But a model that has in fact been followed, at least for the spatial analysis of biodiversity, agricultural and otherwise. And with some success. Maybe time for the crop distribution modellers to try it?
Let’s remember this is important. We’re not just arguing about how to make prettier maps. Identifying what constraints are going to be most significant, when, where in the world, for each crop, is going to be crucial in setting breeding agendas for the next 20 years and more. Breeders need to be able to explore and interrogate these future suitability maps, and explain what they get out of them to their bosses and the policy-makers above them. It’s important to make them as accessible and easy to use as possible. What we have at the moment is not fit for purpose.