- Wild coffee studied; report from Madagascar.
- Adding value to tequila. Lots of value.
- Vietnamese farmers go wild.
- Vietnamese farmers get drunk.
- All about Vitamin D.
- “…cranberries are the neglected stepchild of the season.”
- What does that make the turkey?
- Gates Foundation moves into space. Via.
Crop maps of Russia and its neighbors
I have often looked for detailed crop distribution maps for the countries of the former Soviet Union and found these hard to come by. Not any more! There is a fabulous on-line atlas of agriculture in Russia and neighboring countries.
It has descriptions and maps for a 100 crops, including potato and wheat of course, but also lesser known niceties as the Snowball Tree, Sea Bucktorn and Winter Squash. The maps are pretty, here is an example for Siberian Wild Rye (you know, Siberian Black-eyed Susan; Clinelymus sibiricus (L.) Nevski). Better still, they will be available for dowload in GIS format next year.
There are also entries for 540 wild crop relatives and other agriculturally relevant plants, and for pests, diseases and weeds.
Awesome.
Nibbles: Creole cooking, Cattle, Greenhouses, Cartograms
- Seychelles’ “living botanical herbarium of Creole Culture.”
- Kerala tries to save Vechur cattle.
- Terra Madre day 3: Tom ♥ Vandana.
- Pix of how intelligent greenhouses can be used to grow huge vegetables. I wonder if these technique can be applied to regenerating accessions in genebanks
- Don’t you just love cartograms?
Vavilov blogs up a storm in the Pamirs
Disappearing wild potatoes mined for drought tolerance
An article in National Geographic looks at possible changes in the climate of the Andes, how they will affect potatoes, and what breeders are doing about it. The wild relatives are very much to the fore:
“The crosses we are developing between wild, drought-tolerant varieties and modern potatoes now are for the future,” said Meredith Bonierbale, senior potato breeder at the International Potato Center in Lima.
The article also quotes our friend, colleague and occasional contributor Andy Jarvis, ((Andy works for CIAT and Bioversity in Cali, Colombia.)) who recently collaborated with others on a paper which concluded that some of those very same wild relatives are themselves threatened:
“Even if we halt habitat loss, in the next 50 years, climate change could undo all of the conservation that we already have,” said Jarvis.