A blog post from Kew alerts us to the fact that the collecting notebooks and photographs of Prof. Jack Hawkes, recently deceased pioneer of the plant genetic resources conservation movement, were accessioned into its Archive last year. They must make for fascinating reading. I hope they will be scanned and put online in due course. One does wonder, though, why these precious papers did not find a home at the University of Birmingham, where Prof. Hawkes taught for so many years, and indeed established a seminal MSc course. Anyway, the important thing is that they will be properly taken care of and made available to researchers. Like all the wild potato herbarium specimens and germplasm Prof. Hawkes collected over a long and illustrious career.
HortCRSP published online map
Psst, wanna find out about horticultural projects around the world?
View Horticultural Projects in a larger map
Nibbles: Seeds, Organics, Absinthe, Potato, Cattle genome, Tree diseases, Rice, ABS, Avian flu
- Software will ease seed availability. No, really.
- Enforcement of organic regulations sometimes flawed. No really.
- Absinthism a myth. No, really.
- Potato film hits big time. No, really.
- “Influential” bulls sequenced. No, really.
- Tree diseases distribution will change under climate change. No, really?
- Boffins in drive to double rice production in Africa. No, really.
- Boffins and lawyers meet to sort out biodiversity access and benefit sharing thing. No, really. And, incidentally, what could possibly go wrong?
- H5N1 committee wonders whether they have sampled enough. No, really.
Twittering rice
The Africa Rice Centre is tweeting (twittering?) away at the African Rice Congress in Bamako, Mali. Oh, there’s a website too, and a blog with an RSS feed, but that seems so terribly 20th century somehow.
Paper on climate change and species distributions attains classic status
Conservation.Bytes features a landmark 2004 paper on the projected effect of climate change on species distributions as its latest Conservation Classic. It also points to a 2008 summary of such studies over at BraveNewClimate. Regular readers will know that there have been studies which have focused specifically on the wild genepools of different crops.