Brainfood: Sierra Leone rice, Bean breeding, Cacao geographic diversity, Red fleshed apples, Species richness & productivity, African maize diversity, Human expansion, Barley gaps, Wild coffee and CC, Acacia and CC, Genetic erosion

Nibbles: Tree diversity, Cacao strategy, IFPRI strategy, Caribbean strategy, Mango conservation strategy, Olive migrations, African cassava, African Striga, Ecosystem services, Model plant

Saving rice from a truant monsoon

Forsaken by the rain gods, the tribal farmers in the district are now mounting a desperate attempt to salvage their wilting crop. What is at stake is not only their livelihood, but also the preservation of over a dozen rare and invaluable indigenous varieties of rice. If the attempt by these farmers doesn’t succeed, the state could lose many rice varieties for ever…

“These tribal farmers have been the sole saviours of the seeds of many indigenous and rare varieties of rice. They have been cultivating and saving them religiously despite suffering losses as these varieties have only half the yield when compared to hybrid ones…”

Well, maybe. But Jeerakashala, Navara, Adukkan, Thondi and Chomala are in fact in IRRI’s genebank, according to Genesys.

IUCN and Microsoft map threats to biodiversity

“We’re building an application that allows people to map those threats spatially,” Joppa explains. “We’re trying to provide a repository of evidence for threats to species.”

Lucas Joppa is talking about a collaboration between Microsoft and IUCN to map threats to biodiversity. Worth keeping an eye on. But I wonder if they’ll consider agrobiodiversity too. If so, we have some ideas here at the blog. Anyway, presumably the thing will link up with GeoCAT in some clever way.

LATER: And also link to this? Or at least suck in the data?