Category: Featured

Chris Smaje needs your help:

I’m no expert in this area, but the sort of data I typically see used to suggest the green revolution’s success is pretty unconvincing. I wrote a little piece with some general thoughts on this on the Stats Views website. I’d be interested if anyone can point me to evidence that avoids some of the traps I discuss therein.

Any thoughts?

Jenny likes nothing better than a CGIAR comms smackdown, but doesn’t think that’s what going on here:

Not that I don’t love a good CIMMYT-IRRI comms competition – ha! – but I think it’s only fair to point out that John Vidal crapped all over CIMMYT’s mission and Borlaug in another recent article.

There’s much more, have a look.

Ed Carr explains my over-compressed Nibble about his recent post on aid and development:

I was arguing more about how we think about adaptation, and who is doing the adapting. Obviously adaptations will have to occur in some systems, but I am concerned that development donors and implementers too often assume that all such adaptations will have to come from outside the communities and countries in which they are needed. And this is a problem related to how we see those in the Global South – a persistent narrative of poor and helpless that causes us to overlook their capabilities, and to overestimate our own…

Indeed.

An item in Monday’s Brainfood prompted Brian Ford-Lloyd to revisit the concept of core collections. The paper looked at “similarity groups” in genebank holdings.

One important question they addressed was ‘why identify similarity groups?’ (not to be confused with duplicates), and only time will tell whether their expectations will be met.

However, there are other issues that occurred to me. One is the relationship with ‘core collections’ (which are not mentioned in the article) of which there are now many, even for a single crop such as rice, and which are proven to be of considerable use (see: Genetic resources and conservation challenges under the threat of climate change, Ford-Lloyd, Engels and Jackson – in Plant genetic resources and climate change – Jackson, Ford-Lloyd and Parry, 2014) (sorry for the plug!). So, having identified similarity groups, is it now necessary to go back and redesign core collections? This seems unlikely, but it would perhaps be worthwhile checking core collections to see the extent of occurrence of ‘similar’ accessions. This might have particular value, not necessarily to ensure maximised diversity within core collections. It might be useful to look for similar accessions to those that have already proved to be of value within core collections, possibly revealing similarly adapted accessions of even greater value.

Roel Hoekstra reacts to our suggestion that CGN may want to consider changing the taxonomic determination of a potato accession in its genebank:

In general gene banks should be conservative in renaming accessions and not follow the latest publication, unless there is a clear misclassification … The suggestion on this Weblog, that CGN should rename accessions CGN18108 (from ARG) into S. venturii should probably include all okadae’s from ARG. However, taxonomy is a sensitive issue. So far, CGN was reluctant to rename okadae accessions, in particular as long as Sturgeon Bay does not rename them. Too much renaming may confuse/annoy the users of the germplasm. The discussion on this Weblog at least triggers to take a look into the available data again. Personally, I would not be surprised to once find these two species reunited again.

That ellipsis stands for a pretty lucid summary of the nomenclatural history of the two species involved, very much worth reading in full. Thoughts?