- Slim pickings 1: “Rust never sleeps.”
- Slim pickings 2: silly idea for solving world hunger.
Great ethnobotanical collection online
Another great find from the recent issue of The Plant Press I blogged about yesterday is the Smithsonian’s website on Edward Palmer:
Edward Palmer (1831-1911), often regarded as “the father of ethnobotany,” gathered extensive natural history collections in North and South America during the late nineteenth century and established standards for plant collecting and reporting, particularly for plants useful to people. His scientific framework is still used today. This new Botany website, Edward Palmer Collections provides a window into the Palmer Collection to communities where Palmer originally collected, as well as to scientists and the general public.
Palmer held posts both as ethnologist for the Smithsonian and as USDA plant collector, and the connections between his botanical and anthropological materials are fascinating, and nicely highlighted on the website. Now, is anyone going to try to get DNA out of his corncob?
Historical plant images online
The discussion of plants in religious iconography which followed a recent post (see the Featured Comment box at right) triggered some googling, which eventually led to Plant Image:
Plant Image is a searchable database of plant images, focusing on the Cucurbitaceae and Solanaceae. Searches have been made from various sources including art (mosaics, paintings, and sculpture), illustrated manuscripts, and hand illustrated and printed herbals and books. We are concentrating our search on antiquity (Old and New World), medieval, and Renaissance sources but we intend to include more recent images as well. Bibliographic information on primary and secondary sources will be associated with each image and, in the case of herbals, associated text material will eventually be included. We hope to receive images and information from all persons interested in the Cucurbitaceae and Solanaceae, so that the database will be a living, dynamic document.
An effort well worthy of support.
Belated news of the Smithsonian Botanical Symposium
I’m pretty sure we didn’t report on the Smithsonian Botanical Symposium 2010 “Food For Thought: 21st Century Perspectives on Plants and People” when it was held in September last year, which was very remiss of us. Anyway, you can catch up on the website, of course, but if you want the short version you should read the latest issue of The Plant Press, the Smithsonian’s botanical newsletter. Here, to give you a flavour, is how the symposium was advertized:
The Smithsonian Botanical Symposium, hosted by the Departments of Botany and Anthropology, will examine the 21st century transformation of the study of interactions between plants and people. The invited speakers will cover a wide range of topics: from the role molecular biology now has in elucidating crop domestication to the ways in which peoples across myriad ecosystems interact with specific plants and landscapes.
It certainly seems to have lived up to the billing. The Plant Press has a couple of shorter pieces that might also be of interest, on analyzing an ancient Roman medicine and on an historical ethnobotanical collection. I’ll probably blog about those separately later.
Nibbles: Flora, Agronomy podcasts, Stats, GFAR, Horses, Lettuce, Churst forests, Brazil nut, Grassland diversity, Baobab, Flotation, Botanic gardens and invasives, Nutrigenomics
- Picture guide to West African plants. Includes agrobiodiversity!
- Iowa State Agronomy podcasts. Some cool stuff. Check out the one on “Modeling Seed Germination Over Time to Decide When to Regenerate Seed Lots in Long-term Storage.”
- A “formal global program to develop subnational agricultural land-use statistics“? Riiiiight.
- GFAR meeting on sustainable use of agrobiodiversity says “[w]e need to initiate solid and inclusive actions to build concerted and practical actions on sustainable use.” Well they do say actions speak louder than words.
- Researcher “trying to remove the perception that hackneys are ‘half-crazed.'” I’d rather pay to save them if they were crazy, but that’s me.
- Romaine: germplasm to breeding lines. But to cultivars? Private sector to pick up the slack.
- Crops not mentioned among species that save our lives.
- Saving sacred groves in Ethiopia. By building pit latrines. Well why not?
- Brazil nut spread by people.
- A trade-off between species and genetic diversity? Say it
ain’t so! - Today’s iconic species threatened by climate change is the baobab.
- An Egyptian archaeobotanical blog.
- Botanic gardens can threaten biodiversity.
- Nature has (or had, it’s a couple months old) a supplement on nutrigenomics.