Information

March 4, 2010March 4, 2010

Berry Go Round

The latest edition of Berry go Round, the blog carnival for all things botanical, is up at Foothills Fancy. Of course, not everything botanical is agricultural, but enough is for me to point you to:

An investigation of pies, from the standpoint of their fillings.
An investigation of old-time fern books, though it doesn’t say that some are good to eat, in small doses. Probably because she’s already done that.
An investigation of witches’ brooms, though not the ones that afflict Theobroma cacao.

March 4, 2010March 4, 2010

Looking for information about Erna Bennett

Our friend Danny has a new blog at agrobiodiversitie, the final two letters of which are a reference to his native Ireland. He’s trying to find out more about Erna Bennett, one of the great pioneers of genetic conservation. Indeed, she coined that phrase, which I didn’t know. Anyway, take a look at Danny’s site and if you can help, leave a comment there. Here’s our contribution.

March 3, 2010

Kew maps botanical diversity

There’s news from Kew that its GIS Unit has an interactive map out looking at the geographic distribution of plant diversity at the genus and family level. Here’s how they did it:

For each genus of flowering plants, distributions were compiled principally from the specimens held in Kew’s Herbarium. In addition, standard reference floras and checklists for each region of the world (as far as possible) were consulted for doubtful distribution records (such as only one or a few specimens of any genus from a particular region, or doubtfully identified specimens). Many hundreds of individual articles were also consulted, and whether or not a genus was native, doubtfully native, doubtfully present or introduced was noted. Only presence has been recorded; regions from which a genus is absent are not listed, and there is no record of abundance, extent of distribution within regions, or numbers of species either of genera or within regions.

It’s nice enough and all, but I don’t really understand it. I mean, why use those funny regions? Why not proper ecoregions? What’s wrong with just using countries? Anyway, it would be interesting to know if something similar is being planned for the plants conserved in the Millennium Seed Bank, which was coincidentally in the news again this week. Or, indeed, with the material conserved by the international genebanks of the CGIAR system, data on which is to be found in the SINGER database.

March 3, 2010September 7, 2018

Nibbles: Climate, Shitstorm, Fish, Food, Biotech, Talk, Drought, Bananas

Community-based adaptation to climate change. A book from IIED.
This really is outrageous. Manure is now a pollutant in the world’s most wasteful economy. h/t Ethicurean.
Where have all the fishes gone, gone to flowers every one.
Dept. of Uh-huh: Innovation in traditional foodstuffs could harm their image.
Dept. of Uh-huh Pt 2: An over-dependence on genetically modified organisms to boost agricultural production eclipses other biotechnologies and their potential to benefit poor farmers in developing countries.
Adam Forbes is giving a talk about his seed-searching travels, March 22, Princeton, NJ. Go! Report!
Malawi’s miracle laid low by drought?
IITA leads seven African nations against banana diseases.

March 2, 2010March 2, 2010

UG99 in the internet mainstream

It was Lord Beaverbrook, I think, who said that if something had not been reported in his once-mighty Daily Express, then it hadn’t happened. ¹ For netizens of the modern age, much the same could be said of MetaFilter; if it isn’t there, it’s nowhere. And so it came to pass that UG99, recently covered by Wired magazine and Nibbled here, is officially a threat; it says so on MetaFilter.

I’m not actually a member, nor do I care to be. ² But if I were, I’d be responding to some of those comments, oh yes. And thanks to those comments, I’ve learned that the Wired piece’s author keeps a blog, which contains stuff that had to be left out. Cool.