- Where should we collect sweet potato wild relatives?
- Cheese made from toe bacteria. Because we can.
- The sainted M.S. Swaminathan on millets.
- FAO brings together dietary guidelines from around the world.
- An infographic on kale origins.
- Diversity down, productivity down. At least in Alaska.
- Cotton’s got a genome.
- McDonalds commits to ending deforestation in its supply chain.
- IUCN report says commercial agriculture and forestry could could actually be good for biodiversity. Hope McDonalds read it.
Nibbles: SDGs, Seed book, Magic millets, Medieval diets, Obsessive botanist, Cocoa melting gene, Double sake, Simcock, CIMMYT double, Popular breeder, Georgian wine odyssey, Cinnamon vid, Yam bean factsheet, Jackfruit bandwagon, Prairie berries
- Agriculture and the SDGs in one nice infographic thingy.
- Seeds: The Book.
- Seeds like millets?
- Those medievals really knew how to eat.
- An obsessive botanist? Whatever next.
- Deconstructing chocolate, one gene at a time.
- Sake 101. And for a more in-depth look…
- Joseph Simcox, self-described “Internationally Renowned World Food Plant Resource Authority” takes you “on a World Adventure to learn about little known edible plants!” On Facebook.
- A journey into the heart of CIMMYT. They’ll even screen your maize for you.
- The people’s breeder.
- Tracing wine to its source: Georgia.
- Harvesting cinnamon. With video goodness.
- FAO unleashes its mighty comms machine on another poor neglected crop: yam bean. Not many people hurt.
- Watch out jackfruit, you’re probably next.
- Or maybe saskatoon berries (Amelanchier alnifolia).
DOI see the future of genebank documentation?
Mike Jackson, indefatigable blogger and former manager of the IRRI genebank (among other things), is on a mission.
I’m on the editorial board of Genetic Resources and Crop Evolution. I have proposed to the Editor-in-Chief that any manuscript that does not include the germplasm accession numbers (or provenance of the germplasm used) should be automatically sent back to the authors for revision, and even rejected if this information cannot be provided, whatever the quality of the science! Listing the germplasm accession numbers should become a requirement for publication.
Draconian response? Pedantic even? I don’t think so, since it’s a fundamental germplasm management and use issue.
As regular readers will suspect, we’re totally behind Mike’s pedantically draconian suggestion here. We’ve said much the same thing ourselves on occasion. We’ve even taken it a step further and suggested globally unique identifiers for each genebank accession. Well, not entirely coincidentally, Genesys has just announced a major new feature along these lines:
Genesys database was upgraded to allow for enhanced handling of archived accession data. Accession records in Genesys are assigned a Universally Unique Identifier and are accessible with Persistent Uniform Resource Locators.
A step in the right direction? Over to you, genebank data geeks.
Nibbles: Svalbard double, AgAtlas upgrade, Ornamental database, Wild apples, Genetic garden, Sandalwood trade, Amazon dams, Body bacteria, ICRISAT blog, African greens, Aquatic camel, Mujer empowerment
More of a proper catch-up Nibbles later, but these should hold you for a while.
- Le Figaro goes to Svalbard.
- But Wired goes into much more depth on the tragic situation in Syria.
- Many AgAtlas pages now include interactive mapping and data download, eg AEZ. About time :)
- Looking for information on varieties of ornamental plants? Look no further.
- Diversity in wild European apples: past, present and future.
- Genetic garden opens in Bangalore.
- The perils of sandalwood smuggling.
- Dam the Amazon, full speed ahead! What will happen to all that human body bacteria diversity?
- ICRISAT’s new DG has a blog. Looking forward to his first foray into the genebank.
- Lots of stuff on African traditional veggies in AVRDS’s latest newsletter.
- The swimming camels of Gujarat get protection. I’d pay money to see them, I really would.
- Patagonian women farmers are doing it for themselves, at last.
Monitoring plant diseases
I think we may have blogged about ProMED before, but I don’t feel at all guilty about another shout-out. I have no idea to what extent the whole thing is automated, but if there’s anything in the press about a disease — of plants, livestock or humans — it gets a little write up on the website, and a dot on the map. And you can sign up for email alerts or subscribe to an RSS feed, or indeed to their Twitter feed or Facebook page if that’s your vice. I sometimes dream of doing something similar for all kinds of threats to agrobiodiversity.
And while we’re on the subject, just a reminder that there’s a new new app for Pacific pests and pathogens, courtesy of those nice people at Pestnet.