- The International Buffalo Knowledge Resource Service has a website. No, really.
- Plants for a Future website includes crop wild relatives. No, really.
- Thai jasmine rice trademark pirated. No, really?
Mapping drought risk
Just a quick follow-up to the rhyming couplet on water-related stresses in the just-published Brainfood. The Center for Hazards and Risks Research (CHRR) at Columbia University, which we have mentioned here before in connection with tsunami risk, also has data on Global Drought Hazard Distribution.
With a little R-related effort by Robert 1 you can get a Google Earth file, which looks like this for Asia. 2 I’ve also added MODIS fire hotspots for the past 24 hours, merely because I can. That would be the little fire icons.
And that means you can mash up drought risk with germplasm origin (from Genesys, say), in this case from Chad as an example.
Which is a great thing to be able to do because as we have just had reconfirmed by our friend Dag Endresen, the origin of germplasm allows you to make some predictions about its performance.
Nibbles: Cardamom, FIGS, Descriptors, Haiti
- Cardamom scrutinised.
- A Lifeboat to the Gene Pool. Our friend Dr Dag “provides some of the first experimental evidence to support the FIGS concept”. With slides.
- Descriptor lists are important, says Bioversity today. No joke.
- An investigation, quite possibly partisan, but that’s the point, into emergency seed aid to Haiti after the earthquake.
Nibbles: Gardening, Seed Swap, Mapping, Animal Genebank, Rice, Seed Treay, Nanocellulose, Camels, Bread, food Security
- Gardening is good for you. It’s official. And they didn’t even measure nutrition.
- European seed swap in Brussels.
- More fun for mappers; Training Kit on Participatory Spatial Information Management and Communication. h/t CAPRi
- Australian animal genebank under threat.
- Filipinos ♥ IRRI.
- Big write up of Seed Treaty‘s recent Governing Body meeting in Bali.
- Wired magazine goes nuts for bananas and other fruits as sources of better plastics.
- Camelicious! The worlds first large-scale camel dairy farm.
- Food strikes in ancient Egypt. They’ve been revolting for more than 3000 years.
- Nice round-up of how indigenous communities in Colombia are protecting their food security.
The John Innes Centre reaches out to genebank users
The Germplasm Resources Unit at the John Innes Centre has a new e-newsletter that you can subscribe to. The first issue is just out, and it’s well worth reading. Just to give the lie to my contention, expressed not a day back, that genebanks and users don’t talk enough, the newsletter is described…
…as a further channel of communication with our user community and raise awareness of recent activities and to flag the work of the collections and what we can offer. In this edition we highlight some of our activities of the past growing season while also providing a flavour of some of the work we are planning for 2011.