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?
Nibbles: Climate predictions, Melon sequenced, Banana adoption, CRP networking, Supply chains, NUS value chains, Climate change good
- Rave from the grave… If the endless summer don’t get you, the nuclear winter still will.
- To him that hath… Spaniards bag Euro cup and their first DNA sequence: melon.
- Build a better banana… And you still need to persuade farmers to beat a path to your door.
- Well, maybe a Facebook page will help: roots, tubers and bananas go social.
- Oxfam advice on protecting your supply chains from endless summers and nuclear winters.
- Which might be useful for this training course. But are value chains the same as supply chains?
- Or it might not.
Agricultural input requested for bioinformatics whitepaper
We’ve been asked to contribute an agricultural perspective to the Biodiversity Informatics Whitepaper, a document
…that is intended to inform funding organisations about the priorities as perceived by practitioners in the field.
You can find the document itself, and more background, here. Well worth a read, even if you decide not to comment.