- How is Europe doing at saving its threatened plants? Paper and website available. How many crop wild relatives are threatened in Europe? I think it should be possible to work it out…
- Bioversity colleagues summarize their work on homegardens.
- Introduced plants can be useful too!
- Soil Association continues to quibble about need to double food supply.
- ICARDA looks for heat-beating wheat.
- “Coconut Biodiversity for Prosperity” meet coming up soon in Kerala. Local press excited.
- Jeremy sets the world straight on Pavlovsk.
- Kew et al. set the world straight on how many plants there are in the world. Jury still out on the number of crop wild relatives.
- Vulnerability of vegetation to climate change varies around the world. Well there’s a thing now. Nice maps.
- If you’re running a livestock cryobank I’ve got the software for you.
Nibbles: Tokyo, Biofuels, Genebank conference, Forestry, Pinus, Hunger, Moringa
- Urban agriculture in Tokyo makes no financial sense. So what?
- Growing biofuels in Andhra Pradesh may make financial sense. Sow what?
- EUCARPIA conference. To Serve and Conserve: genebanks exploring ways to improve service to PGR users and effectiveness of PGR conservation. April 2011.
- Recovering Ethiopia’s forests.
- The wrong kind of pine-nut diversity.
- “We can halve hunger.” IFPRI Director General says how.
- Optimising use of Moringa to purify water.
Nibbles: Yams, Agrobiodiversity, Melons, Cacao, Biotropica, Food, Seed saving, Rice pix, Mongolian livestock, Gums
- IITA set to expand its ability to provide the world with yam diversity.
- “Agricultural biodiversity is essential for farmers as it places them in a better position to manage climate change.” Wait, what?
- An exotic melon is found in Birmingham, UK. But can you make juice from its seeds?
- James dissects the latest genome announcement: cacao. Ignore the press release, just read this.
- Biotropica has a special issue on biodiversity. Even some agrobiodiversity.
- The history of food consumption in the 20th century. Scary reading.
- New Internationalist magazine has a special issue on seed saving! But only a couple of articles available online, alas.
- Wonderful photos of the rice harvest from Flickr.
- Mongolian cashmere can only get more expensive.
- Australians have more to cope with than a back-stabbing prime minister, it seems. Their eucalypts are in trouble. Something to do with fire, maybe.
Water, water everywhere, and nowhere
More on that social networking juxtaposition phenomenon. ICIMOD posts to YouTube about villages in Nepal being “In the grip of drought.” And follows it up a few minutes later about “Living with floods” in Assam. Intentional, I hope and think. Meanwhile, SciDevNet looks into the question of whether there’s much more where that came from.
Nobel Conference: Making Food Good
Speaking of Nobel and all that, the 46th Annual Nobel Conference on 5-6 October “will examine the question ‘what makes food good?’ from a variety of vantage points, including those of nutrition, taste, health, agricultural biodiversity, and food security”. Some good people on the bill. By the way, for anyone who is the tiniest bit confused, this isn’t at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden but at St Peter in Minnesota, USA.