- Caribbean coast of Colombia high in cassava genetic diversity. Shakira alerted.
- Costa Rica getting to grips with ITPGRFA. Not many people hurt.
- Fox News Latino has a dietician tell us about Inca foods. In other news, Fox News has a Latino bit.
- Plant Cuttings!
- Did you celebrate the International Day of Struggle against Monoculture Tree Plantations? And does what’s happening with açaí qualify as plantations?
- The London Olympics backlash begins. If you don’t agree with all that, here’s how to make your own meadow. Or restore one. Any crop wild relatives in all meadow-making?
- Nice pic of squash diversity.
- Very geeky presentation on how sequencing the wheat genome is going to solve all our problems. If you can follow it, you’re already convinced.
- Floating plastic islands full of papyrus plants will save Lake Naivasha. I don’t know, but I’d sure like to see it.
Nibbles: Diversification talk, Gene award, Community genebanks, GCARD, Natural products, Nutrition talk, Wild bees, GM for drought fail, Face of breeding, Cheese, Bird, Cacao smuggling, CWRs, Perreniation
- ICRISAT DG agrees with Bioversity DG. Kinda. CGIAR DGs communicating via blog. Who’d have thunk it.
- Borlaug Global Rust Initiative gives its first Gene Stewardship Award to Nepali breeders. I wonder if they work with community genebanks at all. Or what they think about them. Or even if they know they are there.
- GCARD 2 is coming, socially networked up the wazoo. Be afraid.
- Authenticating natural health products via barcoding.
- FAO discussion on making agriculture work for nutrition.
- Nice photos of wild bees.
- Not sure if we already linked to the big report on why biotechnology is not delivering drought-resistant crops.
- Meet a Breeder. Conventional, natch.
- Who moved my artisanal cheese?
- Bird diversity on intensive farms like happy Tolstoyan familes: the same everywhere.
- What’s a poor cacao farmer to do? Obey the law and make a loss, or break it in the hope of breaking even?
- Kew does the crop wild relatives thing for Plantwise, and check out that picture!
- Nature discovers perreniation as salvation of African soils; can resilieficiency be far behind?
Nibbles: Red List, Açaí, Edible forest, Horticulture, Heirloom seed bank, Malnutrition journal, Tea breeding, Speak!
- Can cultivated species get their own Red List? Stefano Padulosi asks the tough questions.
- Açaí: could the wonder fruit also be wonderful for forests? CIFOR asks the tough questions.
- And more: You mean you can eat that?
- Horticulture has rock stars? My turn to ask the tough questions.
- Ok, so what US county is “…a hotbed of diversified, small-scale organic, natural processed food production”? Maybe not so tough.
- Will there be a follow-up to Lancet’s 2008 series on malnutrition? That’s an easy one.
- Luigi’s mother-in-law asks: Where can I get my hands on that drought-resistant tea?
- Got any other questions? World Wide Views on Biodiversity wants to hear from you, this Saturday. (Answers too, I suppose.)
IUCN and Microsoft map threats to biodiversity
“We’re building an application that allows people to map those threats spatially,” Joppa explains. “We’re trying to provide a repository of evidence for threats to species.”
Lucas Joppa is talking about a collaboration between Microsoft and IUCN to map threats to biodiversity. Worth keeping an eye on. But I wonder if they’ll consider agrobiodiversity too. If so, we have some ideas here at the blog. Anyway, presumably the thing will link up with GeoCAT in some clever way.
LATER: And also link to this? Or at least suck in the data?
Nibbles: IUCN conference tweep, ICARDA move, Adaptation stories, Branding and market chains, Tree farming
- Stefano Padulosi of Bioversity tweets from the IUCN conference in Korea. And here’s another way of following proceedings: The Twitter Hub.
- ICARDA forced to relocate.
- Results of survey of farmer adaptation strategies in East Africa. (And CIFOR has more examples.) So why do they need Climate Analogues then? I mean, given what we know about it and all… Oh come on, it’s not as bad as all that, look they’re even using it in Costa Rica. Nobody likes a whiny user. Ok, ok, fair enough.
- Branding not much use to farmers.
- Kenyan banker agrees with my mother-in-law on the usefulness of trees.