Category: Information

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Where will the protein come from?

As everyone and her dog ventures an opinion of how much more food will be needed to properly feed how many more mouths by when, it is worth bearing in mind an idea that was a little bit hidden in Oliver Morton’s wonderful introduction to The Anthropocene, in The Economist a couple of weeks ago.

Although nitrogen fixation is not just a gift of life — it has been estimated that 100m people were killed by explosives made with industrially fixed nitrogen in the 20th century’s wars — its net effect has been to allow a huge growth in population. About 40% of the nitrogen in the protein that humans eat today got into that food by way of artificial fertiliser. There would be nowhere near as many people doing all sorts of other things to the planet if humans had not sped the nitrogen cycle up.

There’s a chart, too.

Industrial nitrogen fixation does not, of course, require oil, but it does require lots of cleaner, cheaper energy, and there’s still no sign of that just around the corner.

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Wallow Fire (may) threaten (some) wild beans. Maybe.

There’s a really bad fire spreading in Arizona. 1

You can donwload all kinds of stuff about it, and even post your experiences of it on Facebook. But can you find out whether any crop wild relatives are threatened by it? Well, sure: all you have to do is go off to GBIF, and choose a likely genus (Phaseolus, say), and download the records, and mash them up in Google Earth with the latest fire perimeter data or whatever. 2 Like I’ve done here:

Coming in closer, and using the NASA GeoTIFF instead of the normal Google Earth imagery, you can put yourself in the position of being able to make some reasonably intelligent guesses about what might be happening to some of these populations, and the genepool as a whole in the area:

But what I really meant is that there ought to be a way to do this automagically, or something. Anyway, it is sobering to reflect that while all hell is breaking loose in Arizona, not that far away to the northeast, in the peaceful surroundings of the Denver Botanical Garden, Anasazi beans are enjoying their day in the sun, utterly oblivious of the mortal threat faced by some of their wild cousins. It’s a cruel world. And there’s a point in all this about the need for complementary conservation strategies that’s just waiting to be made. Isn’t there?

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Breathing life into research

We who are stuck at headquarters, trying to inject a little life into our organisation’s activities, envy the scientists whose activities they are. What adventures they must have! What people they must meet, whose lives they touch and whose lives touch them! What material they must be storing for their anecdotage! What stories they could tell!

Except that they can’t. Because they are researchers. Doing research.

Kenya's favourite beer It’s not that they don’t have the skills. Some of them can tell great stories over a Tusker, baridi sana, and many take wonderful photos and even videos. It’s that they don’t have time when they’re in the field, precisely because they are doing the activities we are trying so hard to breathe life into. And when they get back here, there’s more work to be done. But what if there’s someone tagging along whose de facto job is not to do the stuff but to record the stuff others are doing? You get a rich set of impressions that can really help to bring a project to life, often unintentionally.

Bioversity’s recent field visit to some of its nutrition research in Kenya benefitted from just such a presence, resulting in a fascinating report from “the unofficial video guy”. What’s so nice about it is the immediacy of the impressions. The people were welcoming and gracious. There’s something called “African rice” that is “split and processed” maize. Muù, a “strange fruit that tasted like bittersweet marzipan”. The bus breaking down across both lanes of the road home, giving everyone a chance to learn a grain grinding song, all caught on video.

This is not a plea for jolly outings. It is a plea to recognize two things. That much of the time researchers have more important things to do than think about how to gussy up their work for wider consumption. And that someone whose job it is to do such gussying may stand a better chance of bringing a body of work to life.

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More on visualizing collecting localities

Clearly short of something to say after the almighty media circus generated by the climate change hotspots publication, our friend Andy Jarvis is reduced to celebrating an embarassingly artificial milestone on the DAPA blog today. Normally I would treat such awkward space filling with the contempt it deserves, but today I’m in the mood to, well, fill space. So here goes.

Andy’s post is about the 90m-resolution digital elevation dataset he and his colleagues have been working on for ages. The milestone he trumpets is 750,000 visitors, but more important is the fact that the data is now visible in Google Earth, which I didn’t know. Here’s what a bit of Spain looks like with the normal Google Earth imagery, the records on show being from Genesys. 3

And this is what the same area looks like using the SRTM data:

Advantages to both, I suppose, from a purely aesthetic point of view.

Incidentally, some further playing around with Google Earth revealed a couple of collecting localities for Beta maritima (from GBIF this time) that are easily visible in Street View. Here’s an example, featuring a record from France’s Inventaire national du Patrimoine naturel (INPN), catalogue number INPN_21204166 in case you’re interested. 4

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Nibbles: Food security, Food carts, Cotton, Ritual, C4 C3 CC, American Indian diets, Community genebanks in India, Fowler, Dark earth soil, Domestication