Category: Featured

Simon Linington has a parting shot on genebanks asking for money:

Even if not charging, it may be a useful exercise to remind users of the cost of sending the samples out. This might help focus minds on the service that has been provided regardless of the end value of that material.

There’s a lot more there. Read all the comments and add your own.

Ehsan reminds us of one of the complexities of genebanks charging for accessions:

Often genebanks holds collections arising from other countries from which the accession has been collected. Then, how ethical would it be for a country to request for materials collected from its country and have to pay for it. I think this is another point which should be taken in to consideration.

Lots of other comments, do have a look and add your own.

Cédric Jeanneret-Grosjean thinks he knows why a couple of online mapping tools made me cry recently:

About your patience running out, you can’t really blame the “geeks”. I think the culprits in these initiative (customised online-web map portals two-O and variants) are the bored, misdirected info-comm-know managers and officers wanting such a tool on their corporate website.

Why don’t you tell us what you really think, Cédric? It’s a long comment, but well worth reading in full. And many thanks to Cédric for taking the time to respond to the post.

Rosario Falcon heard our cry for help from Genebank Database Hell, and took pity on us:

This is the link for Puca Lliclla

This is for Pallay Poncho

Thank you, Rosario!

Tim Robinson updates us on livestock data at FAO:

…We had, of course, been working on the collection of the underlying livestock statistics, and the spatial modelling to produce the maps, for many years prior to them being published on the FAO website … but that is all quickly forgotten when they are re-distributed by a third party.

For your information, we have been beavering away since then, collecting more recent and detailed sub-national livestock statistics and disaggregating these using a slightly modified modelling approach, and 1 km multi-temporal, Fourier-processed MODIS imagery from the University of Oxford…

Global datasets coming soon, apparently. We’ll keep you posted.