- ITPGRFA launches stakeholder consultation on sustainable use. First order of business: figure out what the heck it is.
- Maybe Wageningen’s new professor of organic agriculture will know.
- IRRI finds healthy rice. Meanwhile, out on the front lines…
- HarvestPlus puts out an annual report. HarvestChoice gets to grips with lablab. Yeah I find the whole HarvestFillintheblank thing confusing too.
- Nature Education does genebanks. “Ex situ conservation appears to be effective; in situ conservation has few proponents except those who practice it out of necessity.” Whoa, easy, tiger!
- And speaking of education, here are some teaching resources in ethnobiology.
- Some of which may be useful to interesting yoofs in agriculture?
- Raiders of the Lost Coffee Bean? I would have avoided the Indiana Jones parallel, frankly.
- How banana and cereals genomics is going to get us all personal jetpacks.
- In the meantime, a banana tissue culture expert nabs ICAR Punjabrao Deshmukh Outstanding Woman Scientist Award 2011.
- What new technologies would most benefit conservation? DNA and IT, mostly, apparently, naturally.
- Coca Cola sustainable agriculture guy mentions pollinator biodiversity but not citrus biodiversity.
- Profile of the head of agriculture at the Gates Foundation.
- Kew’s Samara does mountain biodiversity, crop wild relatives and much more besides.
- Taro research in Hawaii summarized in a nice PDF.
- Biological and linguistic diversity go together like a, what, horse and carriage?
- The medieval fall of the Irish cow. And the Harappan origins of the curry. Esoteric, moi?
Nibbles: Social CRP, Coconut genebank, Rice breeding, Conservation debate, Mongolian herders, American chestnut, Marine conservation
- CGIAR Research Programme on Roots, Tuber and Bananas gets a blog to go with its Facebook page and Twitter feed.
- Coconut clones? I don’t think so.
- Rice yield gene? I don’t think so.
- NY Times hosts a debate on conservation, and genebanks get a look-in.
- Mongolia’s reindeer herders get some advice.
- “My great grandfather’s legacy is something I grew up knowing and respecting, but my parents’ conservation ethic is something that I have always lived.”
- Marine reserves can be good for fish. And abalone?
Mapping cropland one more time
More cartographic busy-ness from IFPRI. They’re mapping cropland, and need your help to validate the results. That’s because the available maps sometimes disagree. And I’m not even entirely sure they’ve looked at all the maps that are out there. What about IWMI‘s stuff? Or FAO‘s? Or even ESRI’s pretty, but pretty useless, recent offering? I expect most of these use the same raw data anyway. So it’s probably a good idea to try to sort it all out with a bit of crowd-sourced ground-truthing. But I do wonder whether those citizen scientists are looking at extra things, beyond just verifying whether they’re standing in cropland or forest. Like gender, for example. Other bits of IFPRI would probably find that interesting, and would even be able to tell them how to do it.
GCP mounts a full frontal info-attack
CGIAR’s Generation Challenge Programme is mounting a reasonably effective information blitzkrieg, and chickpeas are the shock troops, with blog posts and videos their weapons of choice. A minor triumph is in the offing on the social networking front. But I have to say I think the RSS feeds are a bit of a rout. The main site has way too many. Yet the blogs over at GCP’s main online product, the otherwise quite impressive Integrated Breeding Platform, don’t have any at all, though the discussion forums (and what exactly is the difference?) do. Time to re-think the whole RSS strategy.
Nibbles: Aphrodisiacs, Food Security, Access & Benefit Sharing, Berry Go Round, Weeds, Restoration Ecology, Opuntia, Sustainable cacao, Innovation
- The rich diversity of aphrodisiac foods. Is it February again?
- Why bother doing it myself when someone else had already stuck the knife in The New Statesman.
- Making the Nagoya Protocol work at the community level. I know, let’s have a meeting. But will the ISF be invited?
- June’s Berry-go-Round botany blog carnival is up, with a few relevancies:
- Weeds revisited and rejoiced in.
- A hero of restoration ecology remembered and refound.
- The prickly pear as metaphor is apt and appropriate.
- How green is the cacao industry? This green.
- Yeah but does it qualify as an innovation system?