Category: Genebanks

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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?

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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.

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Nibbles: Studentship, Cowpeas, Chocolate, Quinoa, Rice in Madagascar, Jackfruit, Wheat breeding, Indian diversity

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Following crop development in real time

The Global Agriculture Monitoring Project (GLAM), a joint NASA, USDA, UMD and SDSU initiative, has built a global agricultural monitoring system that provides the USDA Foreign Agricultural Service (FAS) with timely, easily accessible, scientifically-validated remotely-sensed data and derived products as well as data analysis tools, for crop-condition monitoring and production assessment.

Great for deciding on the timing of germplasm collecting expeditions too, I would imagine.