- 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.
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?
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.
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)!
Desperately seeking germplasm
Thanks to Cary for pointing out this interesting request on IdeaConnection, which is basically an online market-place for crowdsourcing solutions to R&D problems. A “client” is willing to pay a finder’s fee of $2,000 for cucumber germplasm resistant to nematodes, Fusarium, CGMMV, downy mildew and cold. Easy money? Hardly. We’re talking about Genebank Database Hell here.
You can search GRIN on evaluation descriptors, but the only one of the target traits for which there are data is downy mildew. Some 175 accessions are listed as having low susceptibility to that disease, but that basically is as far as you can go. You could theoretically download those results with additional data on origin and then maybe focus in on specific countries where you think you might have a better chance of finding cold-tolerant material. Like Canada, maybe. But I was not able to get the download to work. There are probably ways around it, but the bottom line is that at most we’d be able to satisfy one and maybe a half of the conditions. CGN also allows a search on plant traits, but only characterization descriptors, and if any of its 937 cucumber accessions satisfy the search criteria, we won’t be able to find out online. AVRDC does allow a search on pest and disease resistance, but I don’t know enough about the subject to know whether the two cucumber mosaic viruses listed are the same as CGMMV, and in any case there are no accessions resistant to either.
That two grand clearly won’t be easy to claim just by trawling public genebank databases, which is kind of a damning indictment of the state of genetic resources documentation, and probably the reason why the “client” went the IdeaConnection route in the first place. It’ll have to be an inside job, I guess, a breeder or genebank curator who knows they have the requisite germplasm sitting on their shelf, say.
But wait, not all is lost, maybe watermelon might be easier?