Mapping nutrition research

The Leverhulme Centre for Integrative Research on Agriculture and Health (www.lcirah.ac.uk) and the University of Aberdeen are embarking on an interesting project for the UK’s Department for International Development.

The objective of the project is to map the growing research activity on agricultural interventions to improve nutrition in low-middle income countries and identify “gaps” in current and anticipated research.

You might like to consider contributing information if you are undertaking or planning research with a

focus on an interaction between agriculture and nutrition, such as agricultural interventions to improve nutrition and their evaluation, the influence of agricultural practices and food value chains on nutrition, governance and policy processes through which agriculture and nutrition are linked, and links between agricultural productivity and/or growth and nutrition at a macro scale etc.

The people to contact are Corinna Hawkes (corinnahawkes “at” o2.co.uk) and/or Rachel Turner (rachel.turner “at” lshtm.ac.uk). It could be your research, or research you know about. Or indeed relevant networks (mailing lists, online fora, communities of practice) you participate in.

No doubt someone will eventually mash up the results with all the clever maps now available on HarvestChoice‘s recently revamped website.

The cutting-edge MAPPR, for example, enables users to pick and choose among hundreds of “layers” of map-based information about all aspects of smallholder agriculture in Africa—from poverty to rainfall—and make customized maps and summary tables.

But more on that tomorrow. Stay tuned…

LATER: It occurs to the blogger, belatedly, that “to map” has more than one meaning. Ooops.

Brainfood: Bee diversity, Fodder innovation, African agrobiodiversity, Quinoa economy, Fragmentation and diversity, Rice in Madagascar, Rice in Thailand

Nibbles: Quinoa, Chilean landraces, Planetary sculptors, Offal, Eels, Grand Challenges in Global Health, ILRI strategy, Artemisia, Monticello, Greek food, Barley, Rain

  • The commodisation of quinoa: the good and the bad. Ah, that pesky Law of Unintended Consequences, why can we not just repeal it?
  • No doubt there are some varieties of quinoa in Chile’s new catalog of traditional seeds. Yep, there are!
  • Well, such a catalog is all well and good, but “[o]ne of the greatest databases ever created is the collection of massively diverse food genomes that have domesticated us around the world. This collection represents generation after generation of open source biohacking by hobbyists, farmers and more recently proprietary biohacking by agronomists and biologists.”
  • What’s the genome of a spleen sandwich, I wonder?
  • And this “marine snow” food for eels sounds like biohacking to me, in spades.
  • But I think this is more what they had in mind. Grand Challenges in Global Health has awarded Explorations Grants, and some of them are in agriculture.
  • Wanna help ILRI with its biohacking? Well go on then.
  • Digging up ancient Chinese malarial biohacking.
  • Digging up Thomas Jefferson’s garden. Remember Pawnee corn? I suppose it’s all organic?
  • The Mediterranean diet used to be based on the acorn. Well I’m glad we biohacked away from that.
  • How barley copes with extreme day length at high latitudes. Here comes the freaky biohacking science.
  • Why working out what is the world’s rainiest place is not as easy as it sounds. But now that we know, surely there’s some biohacking to be done with the crops there?

Mapping some life

Yes, indeed Map of Life is indeed live, as we Nibbled yesterday, at least for amphibians, birds, reptiles, mammals and fish. 1 MoL pulls in point data from GBIF, of course, but also polygon distribution maps from IUCN, user-uploaded maps, local inventories from various sources and the regional checklists from WWF. That’s a whole load of different sources, formats and types of data to be served up in one googly visualization. Quite impressive. Which does make one wonder why one is reduced to screengrabs to share the results, as for example below for the yak and Dall’s Sheep, two of the high altitude mammals we featured a few days back. No doubt they’ll sort that out.

And we of course also look forward to the inclusion of plants, and in particular crop wild relatives, in the near future. We can point them to some data sources for those…