Brainfood: Complementarity, Temporality, Communality, Fonio trifecta, Atriplex domestication, Egyptian clover in India, Genebank information systems

Nibbles: Nourishing investments, Genebank RoI, Seed science double, Ecuador genebank, Ethiopian genebank, MSSRF genebank, CG genebanks, Botanic gardens, SwissAid saves seeds, Brazil conservation, Indian diner, Kenyan food, Saladino on citrus, Lost apple, Seed Savers, Hybrids, Germplasm crime

Coffee with everything

It might be because we happen to be doing something on the coffee diversity conservation strategy at work, but I have been noticing a lot of joe-related material online lately. There’s the bit on Sprudge (apparently, “the world’s most popular coffee publication”) about how coffee diversity needs a Svalbard. Seconded. And, from the same source, also comes a spotlight on Madagascar’s amazing coffee diversity.

Moving to West Africa’s diversity, there’s a Financial Times piece on Coffea stenophylla. And something that seems to be only on LinkedIn (for now) from Dr Steffen Schwarz of Coffee Consulate about how microbe diversity can do wonders with the flavour profile and caffeine content of C. liberica.

Finally, an official submission has gone in for Yemeni coffee to be included in UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage List. I wonder if all this bodes well for our thing.

Brainfood: CC & crop diversity, Dietary Species Richness, CC & banana, European genebank representativeness, Effective Population Size, VarScout, Borlotti bean diversity, Oaxacan? Green Dent, Sorghum mucilage, Gut bacterial diversity

Data everywhere, again — or rather, still

A bit of a roundup of data stuff today. Things have been piling up in my to-blog folder, and the time has come to tidy up.

First up, and most relevant here, is the webinar on how to use Genesys. It’s long, admittedly, but well worth it if you have anything to do with genebanks. Genesys can accommodate phenomic data, of course, and coincidentally here’s a set of training materials on how to do characterization and evaluation of plant genetic resources.

The botanic gardens community has its own Genesys-type thing, called PlantSearch, and there’s been an upgrade recently that readers here might be interested in. All that’s missing for the trifecta is herbaria :)

Finally, you might want to combine provenance data from Genesys (or indeed the forest genetic resources databases we blogged about earlier this week) with different features of the environment, right? Right. So let me quickly point to new spatial datasets on the world’s soils and agro-ecological zonation (which, interestingly, allows you to upload the sort of KML files that Genesys can spit out), the extent of cropland in Africa, and — why not? — the global distribution of cattle, goats, sheep and horses.