- Discover taxonomic names in files, websites, etc…
- Chinese genebank collecting wild species in Tibet.
- Touring a non-government genebank. And running another one.
- Not a community one, though.
- Everybody talking about scaling up. Here’s how you do it. Probably need the media involved, right?
- Scaling up did for the bison.
Nibbles: Pollinator book, Museums, Quinoa and celiac disease, Plant growth analysis, Mangroves, Plant health
- You’ve heard of alternative lifestyles? Now read all about alternative pollinators.
- Why should we spend money digitizing natural history collections?
- Not all quinoa cultivars may be good for celiacs.
- The largest comparative growth experiment ever. Hope some of the 600+ species are crop wild relatives.
- Mangroves trap heavy metals. And sequester a lot of carbon. But they are moving. Thank goodness there’s lots of ways to value the services they provide.
- CABI’s Plantwise Knowledge Bank is online.
- Kew boffins blow up coffee. The genus, settle down.
Nibbles: ITPGRFA consultation, Organic Wageningen, Rice good and bad, HarvestXXX, Genebank education, Ethnobiology teaching, YPARD, Wild coffee prospecting, Banana & cereal genomics, In vitro award, Coca Cola and conservation, Sam Dryden, Samara, Taro in Hawaii, Biodiversity and languages, Ancient food
- ITPGRFA launches stakeholder consultation on sustainable use. First order of business: figure out what the heck it is.
- Maybe Wageningen’s new professor of organic agriculture will know.
- IRRI finds healthy rice. Meanwhile, out on the front lines…
- HarvestPlus puts out an annual report. HarvestChoice gets to grips with lablab. Yeah I find the whole HarvestFillintheblank thing confusing too.
- Nature Education does genebanks. “Ex situ conservation appears to be effective; in situ conservation has few proponents except those who practice it out of necessity.” Whoa, easy, tiger!
- And speaking of education, here are some teaching resources in ethnobiology.
- Some of which may be useful to interesting yoofs in agriculture?
- Raiders of the Lost Coffee Bean? I would have avoided the Indiana Jones parallel, frankly.
- How banana and cereals genomics is going to get us all personal jetpacks.
- In the meantime, a banana tissue culture expert nabs ICAR Punjabrao Deshmukh Outstanding Woman Scientist Award 2011.
- What new technologies would most benefit conservation? DNA and IT, mostly, apparently, naturally.
- Coca Cola sustainable agriculture guy mentions pollinator biodiversity but not citrus biodiversity.
- Profile of the head of agriculture at the Gates Foundation.
- Kew’s Samara does mountain biodiversity, crop wild relatives and much more besides.
- Taro research in Hawaii summarized in a nice PDF.
- Biological and linguistic diversity go together like a, what, horse and carriage?
- The medieval fall of the Irish cow. And the Harappan origins of the curry. Esoteric, moi?
Brainfood: Cacao, Yak genome, Quinoa production
- The Search for Value and Meaning in the Cocoa Supply Chain in Costa Rica. Organic and Fairtrade are all very well, but watch out for “integration of the story of producers’ commitment and dedication; shared producer and consumer values of social and environmental responsibility; and personal relationships between producers and consumers”.
- The yak genome and adaptation to life at high altitude. Guess what. They’re genetically adapted to high altitude!
- What is Wrong With the Sustainability of Quinoa Production in Southern Bolivia – A Reply to Winkel et al. (2012). One thing that’s wrong is that the link to Winkel et al. is broken. So here it is …
- The Sustainability of Quinoa Production in Southern Bolivia: from Misrepresentations to Questionable Solutions. Comments on Jacobsen (2011, J. Agron. Crop Sci. 197: 390–399). You can make your own way further down the rabbit hole.
Bananas in Bogor: be there
Banana breeders — and others with an interest — are meeting in Bogor to discuss, er, banana breeding under the auspices, I believe, of Musanet and the Global Crop Diversity Trust. ((Can I find a link to the meeting? Can I heck.))
Our very own Luigi Guarino is there for his day job, tweeting up a storm at #musanet. They’re lucky to have him. And so are we. One fascinating idea already from Jim Lorenzen of IITA: resynthesize the banana. How cool would that be? ((Lorenzen doesn’t mention resynthesis in this recent blog post about breeding superior cooking bananas.))
LATER: This is not a new idea, as this extract on CIRAD’s work from a 2008 book shows.