- Ethical Considerations in Agro-biodiversity Research, Collecting, and Use. In case you were thinking of doing some.
- Seed control ceded?
- “Scores of women from the rural households brought in finest homemade recipes on coconut.” My kind of conference.
- “Unique plant bank threatened,” says Google Translate of Nordic genebanks. Thanks Britta.
Old and new Nordic spring wheats side by side
Pictures being worth a thousand words, and all that, here are pictures — moving pictures, no less — of some Swedish wheats that were planted out for regeneration and characterization earlier in 2010.
Thanks Dag for the link. How hard would it be to make links to this sort of thing available from all-knowing databases, I wonder? Dag thanks the film-maker, Axel Diederichsen, for putting the names of the varieties into his description of the film, and suggests adding the accession numbers. If everyone did that, some kind of spider could surely crawl the web looking for, and linking to, any and all mentions of the number, and linking to them. With human curation, of course.
Is that crazy?
Fruit tree genebank faces the chop
An important field genebank of rare fruit trees faces an uncertain future as a result of financial support. No, not that one. Bioversity International reports that the Pomona Botanical Conservatory in Apulia, Italy, has failed to obtain a much needed grant to support its activities.
And in other threatened genebank news, our friends in the north report a visit from Swedish National TV to the Nordic Genetic Resources Center to cover budget cuts there.
According to our friends, half the staff will lose their jobs at the start of 2011 if the crisis is not resolved, “and the Nordic countries may start to lose the genebank collection of genetic resources carefully preserved during more than three decades”.
How fine that all this should be happening as the world discusses the conservation of biodiversity at Nagoya.
Nibbles: SRI, Apples, Neem, Svalbard
- System of Rice Intensification (SRi) works in Panama. Yields up 47%, water down 86%.
- 28 great apples available in New York.
- Neem tree provenance trials; results from Nepal.
- Wired does Svalbard. Cool squared?
Nibbles: Studentship, Cowpeas, Chocolate, Quinoa, Rice in Madagascar, Jackfruit, Wheat breeding, Indian diversity
- PhD student from East Africa wanted to study greenhouse gases, biochar and other cool stuff.
- Weevils eat half the cowpea harvest. Solution in the bag.
- Ecuadorian chocolate experts visit the World Bank. Did they bring samples?
- Lots of ecdysteroids in quinoa. Not clear to me if this is good or bad.
- Yes, Malagasy rice is different.
- Evaluating a Dang Rasimi jackfruit. Looks pretty good to me.
- Crop wild relatives in genebanks help with drought tolerance in wheat.
- Meta-paper on livelihoods diversity in rice-wheat-livestock systems Indo-Gangetic Plains has no room for varietal diversity in rice-wheat.