Category: Information

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Fear not, teachers of FGR, help is at hand!

In response to increasing demand for capacity building on forest genetic resources (FGR), Bioversity has just launched a training manual for forestry practitioners, lecturers, trainers and students to increase understanding of how to manage diverse and complex forest and other tree based ecosystems sustainably. It can be used for teaching and learning about FGR issues both in formal education and on-the-job training.

So we are told, and so we believe, and we’re more than happy to spread the word. The training materials include, among other things, videos on Youtube (see below), and PowerPoint presentations on Slideshare. All that’s missing is a Facebook page and a wiki and the Web 2.0 makeover will be complete. Happy learning — and teaching!

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CIAT and climate change and blogging

“Using blogs and new media to tell the story of climate change and adaptation”, did you say? Let CIAT show you how. On the same day, their multifarious blogs sport a post on the new climate change book on the block, “Crop Adaptation to Climate Change,” from Wiley, to which they have contributed massively. And also a handy summary of the CGIAR Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security Research Program’s “Mapping hotspots of climate change and food insecurity in the global tropics,” CIAT being the lead centre in CCAFS. There’s also a press release on the hotspots report. However, if the word “hotspots” conjures up visions of the possibility of precisely and reasonably narrowly targeted interventions, beware. In this game, as in many, I suppose, it really does all depend. This below is as good a candidate for the money map as any. But you really do have to read the whole thing, and look at all the maps. And there’s a lot of them. They’ll all be available as Google Earth files soon, right guys?

LATER: And they make it into Time!

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Nibbles: Fashion, Climate change meeting, Yams in the Pacific, Poor excuse to quote Bob Dylan song, AnGR, Food in the Pacific, Cacao, Iraqi marshes

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Variety Savers of Europe try to unite

The European Network of Breed and Seed Savers is a website for listing all keepers of indigenous livestock breeds and culivators of indigenous cultivated plants found in Europe. Variety-Savers should be used to network, to share information, to list events and to sell products and services relating to conservation of European agrobiodiversity.

Just off the ground, and only 14 members so far, but this looks like an interesting initiative. Especially if it manages to bring formal-sector genebanks closer together with on-farm conservation practitioners and amateur heirloom enthusiasts. You do have to register, but it’s fairly painless, and the website provides some fancy social networking tools. Very best wishes!

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Googling crop production

Speaking of Google, can it be used to map crop production, the way it can be used to map outbreaks of flu or dengue? Well, according to Google Insight for Search, this is the pattern of searching for the word “soybean” you get for China.

And this is one of the nicer maps of soybean production in China I was able to find online:

Not bad, but not great. Pretty much the same for Brazil. I guess it was worth a try, but if you want production maps for crop X, your best bet is still to just search Google Images for, well “X production map.” Or maybe ask the CGIAR or FAO GIS tribe. No, wait…