Late last year I blogged about what an early warning system for erosion of agricultural diversity might look like. I was thinking of an active reporting system, but today Conservation Maven reminds me of a paper published a few months ago that suggests that a more passive approach might also be possible. The authors ask the question: Can researchers who are interested in ecological monitoring tap into … increased flows of information by “mining” the internet to detect “early-warning” signs that may signal abrupt ecological changes? The paper is behind a paywall, but I’ve ordered it. Once I read it, I’ll report back whether web crawlers have a future in genetic erosion monitoring.
Greenpeace 1, Nestlé 0
Have you been following the Web 2.0 Greenpeace vs Nestlé brouhaha over unsustainable oil palm plantations? The whole thing is lucidly and attractively laid out below. Now that the social web has Nestlé on the ropes, can we get them to support cacao genebanks around the world? Forever.
Nibbles: Health, China, Sustainable coffee, Citrus
- Food Systems and Public Health: Linkages to Achieve Healthier Diets and Healthier Communities. Quite a mouthful…
- Podcast: A Snapshot of Chinese Agriculture with Mike Mulvaney. Mouthwatering.
- “…how can agricultural landscapes produce more with less impact?” The BBC tells us.
- Florida’s citrus in trouble. Genomics to the rescue?
Online photos of protected European food products
Why We Love the Internet, volume 36. There’s a Flickr group on “Food products in the EU Protected Designation of Origin scheme.” Something we blogged about recently, as it happens. The map is really cool. Well, actually, the whole thing is cool.
Hawkes papers find a home away from home
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.