- Apps: how not to solve the problem of kids’ nutrition.
- Giant pumpkins: solving a problem that doesn’t really exist.
- UNFSS: a waste of time or a first, necessary step in solving the problem of our age?
- Museums: if in doubt about a problem, build one.
Your trusted source on genetic resources
Periodic reminder that if you’re into genetic resources — of crops, livestock or forests — you should consider publishing in Genetic Resources, especially if your work cuts across the usual silos.
Genetic Resources is an open access peer-reviewed journal publishing original research, reviews and short communications on plant, animal and forest genetic resources, serving stakeholders within and across domains. It is a platform to share domain specific and interdisciplinary knowledge and tools used by the global community of practitioners involved in monitoring, collecting, maintaining, conserving, characterizing and using genetic resources for food, agriculture and forestry.
And well worth having in your RSS feed of course. I dunno, are RSS feeds still a thing for anyone else?
Genetic Resources is inspired by the no longer existing Plant Genetic Resources Newsletter and Animal Genetic Resources journal and aims to fill the gap created by their discontinuation. Its scope and setup draw from the results of a survey conducted among stakeholders within the framework of the GenRes Bridge project. Genetic Resources is published by Bioversity International on behalf of the ECPGR Secretariat.
Nibbles: Ethiopian gardens, Potato history, Early tobacco, Byzantine wine, American grapevines, Farmers & conservation
- Lecture on the enset (and other things) gardens of Ethiopia coming up in November.
- Book on the potato and governance tries to rescue small subsistence farmers from “the enormous condescension of posterity.”
- (Really) ancient Americans may have smoked around the campfire. Tobacco, people, just tobacco.
- Byzantine era wine factory found in Israel. Pass the bottle.
- Meanwhile, half a world away, Indigenous Americans were using their own grapes in their own way.
- Farmers and conservation of crop diversity.
Nibbles: True to the Land, Marcapata Ccollana, Yield Systems
- Book on 65,000 years of Australian food.
- Many thousands of years of agrobiodiversity protected in Peru.
- But who needs all that when we have AI to phenotype wheat spikes in the field.
How are plants doing out there?
The International Workshop on the Global Plant Health Assessment is being held in Toulouse, France, on October 5-8, 2021.
The Global Plant Health Assessment (GPHA) aims to provide a first-time ever overall assessment of plant health in the natural and human-made ecosystems of the world. Plant health is assessed through the functions that plants ensure in ecosystems: “ecosystem services”. The GPHA will assess plant health on the basis of published, science‐ and fact‐based, expert evaluations.
There’s lots of interesting reporting on Twitter using #GPHA2021.
