- You’ve heard of alternative lifestyles? Now read all about alternative pollinators.
- Why should we spend money digitizing natural history collections?
- Not all quinoa cultivars may be good for celiacs.
- The largest comparative growth experiment ever. Hope some of the 600+ species are crop wild relatives.
- Mangroves trap heavy metals. And sequester a lot of carbon. But they are moving. Thank goodness there’s lots of ways to value the services they provide.
- CABI’s Plantwise Knowledge Bank is online.
- Kew boffins blow up coffee. The genus, settle down.
Nibbles: Climate change data, Transcriptomics, Food industry trends, Gelato event
- Climate Adaptation Country Profiles from the World Bank. Better than you might think.
- You don’t need the whole genome, apparently. Now they tell us.
- Where the global food industry is going. Some opportunities there if you think agrodiversity is important, Shirley.
- Wait, there’s a 6-day international event on gelato?
Tenerife diversity illustrated
The Centro de Conservación de la Biodiversidad AgrÃcola de Tenerife (CCBAT) has a Facebook page on which they have just announced the release of an attractive new poster of bean diversity, reproduced here. There’s also one about potatoes. And a book summarizing traditional diversity in all the crops.
Bioversity ramps up its nutrition work
A couple of bits of related news from Bioversity. The book “Sustainable Diets and Biodiversity” is ready for downloading. And the first newsletter of the Biodiversity for Food and Nutrition Project is out. I suppose the project will feed into the new CGIAR Research Programme on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health. But it’s not clear to me what stage of development that has reached. The CGIAR Consortium website doesn’t really say.
LATER: Ok, I found it on CGIAR Fund website, and it does seem that the nutrition CRP has been approved.
The surprisingly peripatetic Bambara groundnut
Well, I finally made it back to the office after a couple of weeks on the road in Asia. Lots to talk about, of course, but it will have to wait for a while because I have too much catching up at work, and then I’ll be back home in Nairobi for the whole of August. But I can’t resist posting one little thing. What you see here is Bambara groundnut being sold in a street market in Bogor, Indonesia, where it is know as, wait for it, “kacang Bogor”, or Bogor peanut. This is the first time I’ve seen this crop outside Africa (inluding Madagascar). What prompted me to post about it is that I just saw an intriguing tweet about the crop from NRI:
Can #bambara nut be an ingredient for wonder food plumpynut? @NRInstitute & @McKnightFdn working in #Tanzania http://t.co/HXwLfqNf
— Ben Bennett (@Bennett123123) July 19, 2012
Wikipedia is clearly wrong about Bambara groundnut’s production areas. Though it does get the reference correct, it looks like it has reproduced the wrong map. But the correct one doesn’t seem to include Indonesia:
Mind you, it doesn’t include Madagascar either, where it is definitely an important crop, and from whence we even have germplasm, as Genesys reveals. I even collected it myself there, back in the day.
Oh, for decent crop distribution maps! Anyway, anyone have any other sightings of Vigna subterranean outside Africa/Madagascar?