- New Year Resolution No. 1: Take the mashua survey.
- New Year Resolution No. 2: Give the Food Programme a break, it can be not bad. As in the case of the recent episode featuring Irish Seed Savers and the only uniquely British veg.
- New Year Resolution No. 3: Learn to appreciate hour-plus talks by CG Centre DGs. And other publicity stunts…
- New Year Resolution No. 4: Give a damn about the next genome. Well, actually…
- New Year Resolution No. 5: Try to understand what people think may be going on with malnutrition in India. If anything.
- New Year Resolution No. 6: Marvel at new maps without fretting about how difficult to use they may be.
- New Year Resolution No. 7: Do not snigger at the British honours system.
- New Year Resolution No. 8: Disengage from the whole are-GMOs-good-or-bad? thing. It’s the wrong question, and nobody is listening anyhow.
- New Year Resolution No. 9: Ignore the next lactose tolerance evolution story. They’re all the same.
- New Year Resolution No. 10: Stop obsessing about beer. But not yet. No, not yet.
- Happy 2013!
Nibbles: Maya nut, Afroculinaria, Biofortification, CGIAR genebanks, FAO data, Rice drought, Bioregions, Sustainable intensification, Caviar, Beer
- Had no idea there were so many Maya nuts around. Glad Jeremy reminded me. And some Central Asian nuts for balance.
- The best of Afroculinaria.
- The best of HarvestPlus. Oh for the time to do a mashup. Anyway, does this count? And what’s that you say? You have a paper you’re writing on the subject?
- CIP genebank sees CIMMYT’s ISO accreditation (certification? whatever) and raises it a new piece of software. ILRI genebank doubles down.
- One Data Portal to Rule them All. At FAO. Somewhat underwhelming, frankly.
- Rice boffins target drought-stressed villages
- New map of bioregions. In the Daily Mail?
- Sustainable intensification debate gets nowhere. Pretty cynical note to leave you with, don’t you think?
- Ok, so here’s something a little more festive. California caviar.
- And some beer to go with that.
Brainfood: Bumper bonanza, Old peas, Irrigated meadows, Cereal mashes, Medicinal plants, Diversity and production, Millet gaps, Seed ageing, Flax core
- First off — a pretty big deal. Taylor & Francis have made a bunch of papers related to sustainable agriculture freely available, but only until the end of December. Happy whatever holiday won’t offend you.
- Twentieth-century changes in the genetic composition of Swedish field pea metapopulations. Metapopulations have become isolated populations. In genebanks.
- Effects of different irrigation systems on the biodiversity of species-rich hay meadows. Change from the traditional irrigation system has affected biodiversity levels, but not a huge amount.
- Research regarding the use of wheat biodiversity for obtaining some cereal-based fermented mashes. Let’s go straight to what we need to know here: the best mash come from spelt wheat. Oh, to be the one doing the organoleptic characterization.
- Cultivation and high capitalization of medicinal and aromatic plants in the Romanian-Bulgarian cross-border region. If you’re really interested, there’s a database that brings it all together.
- Crop biodiversity, productivity and production risk: Panel data micro-evidence from Ethiopia. More crops = more production. But the devil is in the details, I suspect.
- Identification of gaps in pearl millet germplasm from East and Southern Africa conserved at the ICRISAT genebank. We used to do this sort of thing by hand in my day.
- At3g08030 transcript: a molecular marker of seed ageing. This mRNA could predict germination performance of a dry seed lot across species. Good for genebanks?
- Assembling a core collection from the flax world collection maintained by Plant Gene Resources of Canada. You don’t hear much about core collections these days, why is that?
Nibbles: Old rice, New quinoa, Fishy stuff, Cropland landscapes, Forest landscapes, Old seed, Superdomestication, Intensification
- Youth compiles list of rare and extinct rice varieties of Assam. Maybe he should look at weedy rice too?
- Meanwhile, American farmers are learning to grow quinoa, probably including some rare varieties.
- The smelliest fish in the world. No traceability needed for that one, I guess.
- Cropland getting mapped. Presumably including the Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems (GIAHS). Help needed by both, by the way.
- Follow the forest discussions at COP18. High on the agenda: what is a landscape? It’s what you study when you’re being holistic, no? Anyway, there’s got to be a connection to the previous links.
- Boffins find a genetic marker for old seed. Will need to Brainfood this one.
- Pat Heslop-Harrison breaks down superdomestication for you.
- SRI gets a scaling up. What could possibly go wrong?
Geographically confused
Some confusing signals from the GIS folks of the CGIAR. We hear that the team behind the CGIAR Research Programme on Roots, Tubers and Bananas (RTB) met recently to discuss the geographic targeting of their interventions. The payoff is in the mail: “…the team is creating an online digital atlas on everything related to RTB crop development.” Promises to be very useful. But is that the same atlas that was announced at more or less the same time to separate fanfare? Certainly some of the same people are involved, but that’s not always a guide. I did play around with the IBP Generation Atlas for half an hour or so and I have to say I’m profoundly unimpressed so far. Sharing doesn’t really work. You can’t import your own data in any way that I can see. And I couldn’t get a number of the maps in the menu to load, for example the crop distribution one. But no doubt it’s all at the very forefront of GIS technology. So I’ll reserve definitive judgement until I’ve had a proper chance to test it. But don’t let me stop you jumping in. It could just be me.