- Hey Luigi, wherever you are, here’s news of another map for you to pour (cold water) over.
- New Scientist on nettles that grow at the back of caves and that may be relict populations. Odd.
- Botanic Gardens Conservation International wants children to design “local” floral garlands for olympic athletes. Taking localism too far? What’s wrong with laurel?
- Journalist explores biodiversity vs food security arguments in Ecuador. It’s still complicated.
- Bifurcated Carrots is kind enough to link to the index for Replies to the Online Consultation on the review of the EU legislation on the marketing of seed and plant propagating material. Now, who’s going to do the analysis?
- FAO’s 1964 view of how agriculture would need to change in the following 20 years. Fifty years on, where are we?
- Not so sweet: the Samurais of Sugar.
- In Chicago next month? Go and see a play based on a book based on the scientists at the Vavilov Institute during the siege of Leningrad. Then write us a review?
Nibbles: Vigna umbellata, Afghanistan wheat catalogue, Pingali, Camptotheca, Water stress, Organic Farming for Health and Prosperity
- Crops for the Future finds a nice ricebean project.
- The wheats of Afghanistan.
- A former ICRISAT intern speaks. The world listens.
- Collecting the Happy Tree of China.
- Global water stress maps. Does CCAFS know? Or care?
- Rodale hearts organic.
In the land of serendip
Luigi briefly drew attention to the latest offering from our friends at Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security: the Adaptation and Mitigation Knowledge Network. And that — along with all the other maps that seem to have been springing up whenever one’s back is turned — reminded me of a map passage from a little-known Lewis Carroll book, Sylvie and Bruno. 1 Looking for the exact quote, I discovered that it had appeared yesterday in the daily blog of the august Paris Review. 2
Toward the end of Lewis Carroll’s endlessly unfurling saga Sylvie & Bruno, we find the duo sitting at the feet of Mein Herr, an impish fellow endowed with a giant cranium. The quirky little man regales the children with stories about life on his mysterious home planet.
“And then came the grandest idea of all! We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!”
“Have you used it much?” I enquired.
“It has never been spread out, yet,” said Mein Herr. “The farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well.”
Revisiting the passage in question, I discovered that it involves farmers, which entirely justifies me using it here. My real purpose, though, was to disagree gently with Luigi’s complaint that “You can’t really share the AMKN maps” Why would you want to? The map, after all, is little more than an index, like at the back of a book, that adds geography to content to help you find something you’re looking for.
If I wanted to draw your attention to a bit of a book, I wouldn’t point you to “line 36 on page 304” when that’s the entry in the index. I’d point you directly to page 211, where the bit in question resides. Same with the map. Why embed a bit of the map, when all it really does is point you to content elsewhere?
I had hoped there’d be something in the map around Baku, which I would then have taken a screenshot of 3 to illustrate my point and pique Luigi further. But apparently there is no knowledge of climate change adaptation and mitigation happening anywhere CCAFS doesn’t work, which I’m sure is just a coincidence.
Brainfood: Rice yield, Carrot evaluation, Caper chemistry, Rice fortification, Range shifts, Baobab, Tunisian thyme, Drought-tolerant rice
- Rice yields and yield gaps in Southeast Asia: Past trends and future outlook. If average farmers became like best-yielding farmers that would meet 2050 needs, except in the Philippines, where some more structural stuff is needed.
- Method of evaluating diversity of carrot roots using a self-organizing map and image data. The sound you hear is that of butterflies being broken on wheels.
- Bioactive compounds from Capparis spinosa subsp. rupestris. Are pretty much the same as those in subsp. spinosa.
- Constitutive Overexpression of the OsNAS Gene Family Reveals Single-Gene Strategies for Effective Iron- and Zinc-Biofortification of Rice Endosperm. So that’s a good thing, right?
- Analysis of climate paths reveals potential limitations on species range shifts. Corridors not the answer. Or not the only answer. Or not the full answer.
- An updated review of Adansonia digitata: A commercially important African tree. Do baobab scientists not sometimes long for the Time Before Reviews, when they actually, you know, did stuff?
- Genetic diversity, population structure and relationships of Tunisian Thymus algeriensis Boiss. et Reut. and Thymus capitatus Hoffm. et Link. assessed by isozymes. Dad, what’s an isozyme? Ah, son, it’s a thing people used in the Time Before DNA. The two species are different, they need to be managed in different ways.
- Potential Impact of Biotechnology on Adaption of Agriculture to Climate Change: The Case of Drought Tolerant Rice Breeding in Asia. Kinda pointless: “in severe drought both the [drought tolerant] and the conventional varieties were either not planted or, if planted, did not yield”.
Sorghum and ethnicity in Africa
Ever since I contributed to A methodological model for ecogeographic surveys of crops, and suggested that collectors should do this, I’ve been waiting for the time when it would be easy — or even possible — to map the distribution of conserved germplasm on top of cultural, ethnic or language boundaries. The problem has been that maps of such boundaries, 4 though available in various printed formats, have not been much digitized. Or at least I hadn’t come across them. Until I happened on a blog post about the Center for Geographic Analysis’ (Harvard University) WorldMap, an open source web mapping system. The layers provided include one called Ethnicity Felix 2001, which “consist of polygons and labels depicting ethnicity information based on the ‘People’s Atlas of Africa’ by Marc Felix and Charles Meur, Copyright 2001.” Perfect, I thought.
