- The Lancet goes open source. Well, kinda.
- Alt-World Food Prize winners. None of whom are at the Conference on Agroecology for Sustainable Food Systems in Europe: A Transformative Agenda, though.
- I guess there’s no chance of Jeffrey Sachs landing the actual World Food Prize. Well, you never know.
- If you’re in Britain and you get the urge to measure a tree, now you can share your results.
- Maybe the Tunisians should do something similar, at least for their pears, before it’s too late.
- “The plan notes biofuels have an important role to play in increasing our energy security, fostering rural economic development and reducing greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector.” Riiiight.
- “We started doing this before heirlooms were fashionable. We knew in our hearts it was the right thing to do.”
- Quite a bit of agrobiodiversity in the latest Plant Cuttings.
- India goes in for high throughput phenotyping for drought tolerance.
Nibbles: Mapping by phone, Samoan greens, Rice podcast, Juniper threat, Wild yams, Food book, Coconut conservation
- If you can map neglected diseases by phone, can you map neglected crops? I bet you can.
- It’s the turn of Samoans to be chided for not eating enough leafy greens.
- I had no idea AfricaRice had a podcast.
- Now we gotta worry about G&T too? Enough, already.
- Video on the wild yams of Sri Lanka. Not just yams, though, by the look of it.
- 100 recipes to understand the history of food? Count me in.
- More on the Polymotu Concept from our friends at SPC. Great gig if you can get it.
Varieties of climate change
Something is up, no doubt about it. First off, PBS in the US has a longish news report on how farmers in India “find promise in ancient seeds”.
Watch Struggling Farmers in India Find Promise in Ancient Seeds on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.
Strangely, although the farmers are able to find promise in ancient seeds, the report claims that seeds stored at IRRI in the 1960s are too ancient to be viable. Not sure how that works.
One of the protagonists of the PBS video, Debal Deb, crops up again in another video that came to light on the PAR website. According to PAR: “This film follows the construction of a new seed bank premises in Odisha, a venture that provides a potent symbol of Debal’s values”.
With the zeitgeist firmly embracing the idea of agricultural biodiversity, preferably ancient agricultural biodiversity, as a suitable response to climate change, it is good to be reminded that droughts are diverse too. David Lobell looks at two recent scientific papers on drought tolerance. One shows very little difference between specifically “drought-tolerant” maize varieties and other varieties without the drought-tolerance genes.
To me, there are a couple of possible ways to interpret this. One is that the newer varieties being marketed by companies are not really much better in general. Or these results might indicate that the types of droughts the newer varieties were designed for are somehow different than the type of droughts they were exposed to in this experiment. In particular, as we’ve discussed in prior posts, 2012 was a drought characterized by very high temperatures and vapor pressure deficits, the kind of droughts that one expects more of with climate change.
2012, in other words, was not just a dry drought but a hot drought. The other study David looks at compares the two kinds of drought.
What’s really interesting is how remarkably low the correlation between performance in “drought” and “drought+heat” is (0.08).
While not reading too much into either study, Lobell cautions that very hot droughts may require different kinds of varieties from mere dry droughts.
Nibbles: Indigenous conservation, Rice and conservation, Amazon medicines, Organic products, Sustainable oysters, Cherfas at Seed Savers, Calestous Juma, Cassava website, Israeli agritech, Fragaria breeding, Catacol whitebeam, Weather sensors, FAO Commission & Conference, Amartya Sen
- A toolkit to help indigenous communities do conservation. Should they need one.
- On the other hand… Half of Japan’s endangered species hotspots are found in satoyama, which are under pressure. Compare and contrast with rice farming in Thailand.
- Learn all about some medicinal plants of the Amazon, minus their scientific names. Not including runa tea. Lots of other opportunities out there, though.
- Maybe even including oysters.
- Jeremy no doubt to feast on the mollusc after spilling the beans on the EU seed regulations at the Seed Savers jamboree.
- Wonder what Calestous Juma thinks of those regulations.
- But I bet he (and his father, who introduced the crop to his region of Kenya) would like this cassava website to rule them all.
- The Volcani Institute‘s gifts to the world…
- …probably include new strawberries, but not this one.
- Scientists straining, failing to find plant to meaningfully compare to the giant panda.
- Bioversity does up its iButtons.
- And gets a namecheck in a paean to the FAO Commission on GRFA on its 30th birthday. All this FAO stuff is because its Conference is on this week. I don’t suppose any of it will be more important than Amartya Sen’s speech.
Stable identifiers for genebank accessions still a dream?
Natural history collections and herbaria contain many millions of specimens that are used for research. When scientists publish their results they cite which specimens they used so that other scientists can both check the work and build on what has been achieved.
Institutions that hold specimens are publishing increasing amounts of data about (and images of) their specimens on-line. We need to have a way for scientists to reference specimens so that someone reading research results can simply click a link to see the supporting data and perhaps an image. To make this happen we need stable web links to the specimens that the holding institutions commit to maintain for the long term and that are implemented in a similar way across many institutions. Once this mechanism is widely adopted machines will be able to exploit the links to specimens to help do entirely new kinds of research.
This meeting was about establishing a consistent mechanism that will work across institutions.
Yes! And genebank accessions? When can we have some movement on that?