- Frank Rijsberman aims to build a “strong Consortium.”
- Teaching tools aim to improve capacity in plant breeding. And no, I didn’t mean anything by the juxtaposition, settle down.
- Kenyan reality show aims to enhance rural livelihoods. What, are you trying to be funny? No, I tell you, it’s all a massive coincidence.
- You know what, why don’t we just all go to the beach and relax? Nothing like combining work with pleasure…
- You could read the new Plant Cuttings there.
- Or look at 3D photos of cabbages.
- Or fiddle with the latest geeky plant gadget.
- PDF of the European dictionary of domesticated and utilised animals. From the folks at the European Regional Focal Point for Animal Genetic Resources (ERFP). Which is news to me. Relationship to the equivalent on the crops side unclear.
- Speaking of Europe, someone at the Dutch genebank studying gaps in the conservation of crop wild relatives. Welcome to the club.
- Well this sort of thing is not going to help with any gap analysis, is it? Qualifies as assisted migration though, perhaps, which is kinda cool. And may well be needed.
- I wonder what the Brazilian forest code means for crop wild relatives.
- Traditional Japanese rice variety grown in Queensland to help Fukishima victims. Well, yes, but it’s not exactly charity we’re talking about here. And what’s it going to do to all the wild rice there? Which I’m willing to bet is a gap of some kind.
- Speaking of altruistic gestures, the idea to, er, sell the Indian genebank encounters some, er, opposition.
- No plans to sell anything from this new Jersey apple genebank. Except maybe the cider? I wonder, any hazlenut genebanks out there? No, don’t write in and tell me.
- The genebank of the SADC Plant Genetic Resources Centre given a bit of a face-lift on VoA. At least in the trailer, starting at 0:45. Not sure how to get the full thing, but working on it…
- Latvian government plants small veggie patch in meaningless gesture. Paparazzi promptly tread all over it. Not that such things can’t be nice, and indeed useful. Oh, and here comes the history. But maybe they should have taken a slightly different tack.
- “Orange is the colour of curry.” Why spice is nice. And here comes the science on that.
- And speaking of heat, FAO very keen to tell you what zone you’re in. Oh, hell, there go another couple hours down the drain as I try to navigate the thing.
Brainfood: Healthy berries, Maghrebi arpicots, Visualizing DNA relationships, Below-ground plant diversity, European apples, Rice storage, Barley movement
- Antiglycation activity of Vaccinium spp. (Ericaceae) from the Sam Vander Kloet collection for the treatment of type II diabetes. The tropical ones are better. But who is Sam Vander Kloet, I hear you ask?
- Genetic diversity and differentiation of grafted and seed propagated apricot (Prunus armeniaca L.) in the Maghreb region. Well, there really isn’t much.
- Trees and/or networks to display intraspecific DNA sequence variation? And.
- Below-ground plant species richness: new insights from DNA-based methods. Theory says it will be higher than above-ground richness.
- New Insight into the History of Domesticated Apple: Secondary Contribution of the European Wild Apple to the Genome of Cultivated Varieties. No genetic bottleneck, and lots of contribution from local wild relative, making European apples closer to that than to Central Asian ancestor.
- Viability of Oryza sativa L. seeds stored under genebank conditions for up to 30 years. Genebanks work.
- Barrier analysis detected genetic discontinuity among Ethiopian barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) landraces due to landscape and human mobility on gene flow. Barriers to human movement, rather than mere distance, lead to genetic differentiation in barley.
Nibbles: Banana networking, Belgian flora, On farm breeding course, International collaboration, Wheat pre-breeding, Dog evolution
- ProMusa goes all social.
- Belgian flora goes online.
- Plant breeding goes to the people.
- FAO and ICARDA go together.
- Brits go all in on wheat pre-breeding.
- Modern dog breeds don’t go all the way back to the grey wolf.
Brainfood: Spanish emmer, Lathyrus breeding, Vitis in N Africa, European tree niche models over time
- Remnant genetic diversity detected in an ancient crop: Triticum dicoccon Schrank landraces from Asturias, Spain. Strong geographic differentiation even at small scales.
- Grass pea (Lathyrus sativus): Is there a case for further crop improvement? Yes, but then they would say that, wouldn’t they.
- Highly polymorphic nSSR markers: A useful tool to assess origin of North African cultivars and to provide additional proofs of secondary grapevine domestication events. North African cultivars do not derive from North African wild strains. Did anyone really think they did? Well, I guess it’s good to have the data.
- Building the niche through time: using 13,000 years of data to predict the effects of climate change on three tree species in Europe. You have to take into account past distributions when predicting future ones.
Finding your way in the agricultural spatial data jungle
The recent announcement of a major rethink for the HarvestChoice website sent me on a voyage of discovery. Remember that HarvestChoice, “a partnership between IFPRI and the University of Minnesota, generates knowledge products that help guide strategic investments to improve the well-being of poor people in Sub-Saharan Africa through more productive and profitable farming.” That classically includes maps. And there are definitely a lot of spatial datasets on the site. And in Mappr there is a potentially useful online tool for combining different layers and summarizing the results. No doubt a valuable site.
But let me focus here on a separate issue, and that is whether the resources available globally to develop and present such data, in such sites, are being used, er, optimally. The question occurred to me when, in exploring the maps available at HarvestChoice, I came across a dataset labelled “Cattle population (head) (2005).” The source for the data is helpfully provided:
HarvestChoice/IFPRI 2010/FAO. 2007. Gridded livestock of the world 2007, by G.R.W. Wint and T.P. Robinson. Rome, pp 131.
The funding agency is given as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and data availability is described as follows:
Data available for download in CSV format. Spatial data layer may be explored using MAPPR and downloaded in geoTIFF and ASCII raster formats.
Now, the 2007 FAO publication referenced as the source of the data is downloadable as a pdf from FAO. But the data are also available in a variety of formats from the FAO Animal Production and Health Division website. Among the formats FAO (and only FAO) offers is a Google Earth file, which is probably going to be the most useful for the average user.
And then there’s ILRI. Map 4 in their monumental Mapping Poverty and Livestock in the Developing World of 2002 does not look too dissimilar to the above, though it may be based on older data. It’s a pdf, of course, but for all I know the data are also available in a more useable format somewhere on the ILRI website. I can’t be sure because their database of GIS datasets is just too clunky to spend any significant time struggling with, frankly. Which is not to say that I didn’t…
So what exactly has HarvestChoice added to the sum total of human happiness by making “Cattle population (head) (2005)” available on its website, above and beyond FAO’s contribution? I’m really hard put to say. The datasets are easier to use in Google Earth from FAO’s website than in any format provided by IFPRI, in my opinion. And the basic analyses available in Mappr will probably be useful to some, sure, but since sharing the map itself is tricky from there, you still have to got to FAO for that.
So the poor user probably has to navigate at least two separate and quite different websites to get all she needs. One wonders whether the donors behind all of these different efforts to provide data on cattle population numbers around the world (if indeed there were more than one, apart from the aforementioned Gates Foundation) considered that before green-lighting the projects. And, of course, that’s just cattle numbers. Life is just way too short for me to plough through all the other datasets at HarvestChoice looking for overlaps like these, but I’d be willing to bet this is not an isolated example. We know that crop distribution data is also out there in all sorts of different places, forms and formats. And, in fact, there’s some evidence of balkanization in other types of livestock data too. I’m not saying it’s hell out there for spatial data in agriculture, on a par with Genebank Database Hell. But it is definitely a bit of a jungle.
Does it matter? I don’t know. Maybe the users of these types of data really like having multiple websites to visit for downloading and visualization. Maybe the funds involved in developing all these different datasets and websites are minimal anyway. I’d really like to hear from the people involved at HarvestChoice, FAO and ILRI (are there other players?). But is there even a forum in which these guys meet to discuss data issues? Because if there were, and I by some miracle were to be invited to it, what I would say is that what I would prefer is a single place to go for cattle population numbers maps and the like (e.g. crop production data), with lots of options for exporting the raw data for use in my own GIS, the ability to import and combine my own datasets online, and some elegant ways of sharing the results. 1 That, for me, would be value for money. And I can’t believe I’m alone in that.