Yes, we have plenty of banana information

I’ve come across a number of banana-related resources lately, so I thought I’d pull them all together in one post.

First, there’s CropMapper.org, from Bioversity, which “aims to collect, to make available and to share spatial information on global banana production in a single centralized database.”

Then there’s “Banana natural biodiversity mapping,” from iNaturalist. It’s objective is “to map the distribution of CWRs and landraces in primary and secondary centers of diversity” through crowdsourcing. Which I suppose could eventually be added to the more conventionally sourced data in the CWR Atlas.

And finally there’s blog post from IITA describing a project to document banana diversity in the Democratic Republic of Congo using morphological traits that have been overlooked in the past. I assume the data will find its way into the Musa Germplasm Information System. And thence to Genesys.

All these contribute to answering a question that I asked here back in 2010: Where do bananas grow anyway? What I still don’t see, though, is a way to bring all this information together in one place.

And, given that there’s collecting going on as we speak, for example, the information — and the need — will only grow:

A Nibble big enough to choke on

Yeah, yeah, it’s been quiet here for the best part of a month. Work, you know. When you notice lack of action here, though, that doesn’t mean that I’m being completely idle. Not always, anyway. Check on Twitter and Facebook, if you dare, and you’ll see new stuff on a fairly regular basis, because that’s easier to do than a fully-fledged blog post. Anyway, what I’ll do here is a mega-Nibble hoovering up snippets from the past few weeks that I posted on social media but not here.

Brainfood: Vine breeding, Moroccan veggie erosion, Potato charisma, Pigeonpea diversity, Dietary diversity, Cannabis breeding, Cattle domestication, Late blight gene

Brainfood: Rice stress maps, Saline rice, Forage millet, Diversification, Deforestation & diets, CC impacts, Elite cassava, Indian quarantine, Chinese urban ag, Squash diversity, Tomato minerals, Hidden hunger

Brainfood: Mesoamerican fruits, PES, Chinese vegetables, Controlled pollination, Pastoralist fodder, Taxonomy, African nightshades, Ag origins, Divortification