Information

November 2, 2011November 2, 2011

Livestock trifecta

Thanks to the hyperactive DAD-Net, three bits of news of interest for livestock diversity conservation:

A report on Rare Breed International’s 8th Global Conference.
New articles in the journal “Pastoralism” are open access online. But for how long?
NordGen is seeking a leader of NordGen-Farm Animals. It says here there is more info online but I can’t find it. No doubt it’ll be up soon.

LATER: Oh, and here are the pictures from the Pakistani National Goat Show, including some of the winning entries.

November 2, 2011November 2, 2011

Nibbles: Oca, Blog, Phones, UPOV, Finding seeds

Someone else is interested in breeding oca for outside the Andes.
Not to be outdone, the World Agroforestry Centre has a blog.
Which somehow missed this story — Study finds mobile phones empower rural farmers — from World Agroforestry Centre.
The Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV) has a new portal with added database goodness. Luigi dons his spelunking gear.
No thanks, no need. From now on, like this guy in Hawaii, I’m googling.

November 1, 2011November 1, 2011

Nibbles: Fish blog, El Guardabosques, Andean crops, Traditional knowledge

WorldFish director has a brand new blog with a fancy Latin tag. Expiscor: to fish out, to find out, and discover.
Cuba boasts home-grown Guardians of the Forests.
Promotion of Andean Crops for Rural Development in Ecuador. No idea what this is or why it popped up now, but worth sharing anyway.
Bioversity shares slides on The role of agricultural biodiversity in diets in the developing world: Improving diet diversity, quality and ecosystem sustainability.
IIED comes out for traditional methods to cope with climate change. Could we abandon this sterile dichotomy, please?

November 1, 2011November 1, 2011

Berry go Round hits new heights

Mike over at the Slugyard has created an absolute tour de force for the latest Berry go Round, the monthly botanical carnival. What is it? Lets just say that if you hybridised a long dead poet (geddit?) and a bunch of botanical bloggers, you would have his special Halloween edition. I’m just glad it was already All Saints Day here so I could read it in bright sunshine.

Seriously, highly recommended.

Next month is hosted by Nature Hermit, so go ahead and submit something.

p.s. Pat Heslop-Harrison’s equally forceful tour of Halloween botany was too late for this month’s carnival, but is equally worthwhile.

October 31, 2011October 31, 2011

A RING to rule them all

The CIARD Routemap to Information Nodes and Gateways (RING) is a project implemented within the Coherence in Information for Agricultural Research for Development (CIARD) initiative and is led by the Global Forum on Agricultural Research (GFAR).

The RING is a global registry of web-based services that give access to any kind of information pertaining to agricultural research for development (ARD). It is the principal tool created through the CIARD initiative to allow information providers to register their services in various categories and so facilitate the discovery of sources of agriculture-related information across the world. The RING aims to provide an infrastructure to improve the accessibility of the outputs of agricultural research and of information relevant to ARD management.

But what, no germplasm databases? ¹ No Genesys? No WIEWS? Get registering, genebanks (and others)!