Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
Science Progress has a great interactive map on the effects of climate change on different aspects of human life, including health and agriculture.
Clicking on the pin takes you to the original source of the information. And you can add your own pins. This is just the kind of model that we could use in developing our platform for an early warning system for genetic erosion.
Just came across a truly amazing website called TimeTree. You give it the names of two organisms and it goes away and looks at its database of published literature on molecular clock studies and calculates the time when they diverged.
I put in Oryza sativa and Oryza meridionalis and it returned a figure of 2 million years ago (Mya) based on a recent paper. Asian rice and maize diverged about 36.25 Mya. And Homo sapiens and rice last shared a common ancestor 1,397.06 Mya, in case you were wondering. The sheep and goat diverged about 9 Mya.
So much fun one could have… I hope they put in a lot more crop wild relative data, though.
I’ve been alerted to the existence of a new television series from the BBC of definite agrobiodiversity interest, called “Grow your own drugs.” It is presented by James Wong, a young ethnobotanist who trained at Kew and now lectures at Kent University. There’s a book that goes with the series. James “passionately believes that safe, natural remedies can be made from the everyday plants you find in hedgerows, the back garden or local garden centres.”
”Nowadays we think of plants as pretty objects, as soft furnishings in an outdoor room,” he says. “But just two generations ago they were your hardware store and chemist all rolled into one.” In Malaysia, where Wong grew up, everyone treated themselves with natural remedies. Food, too, was used as medicine – not only herbs, but ginger, chilli and garlic to ward off the symptoms of a cold. “My grandmother had a tiny patch of garden,” says Wong, “which to anyone else would just look like a bunch of flowers, but she could make soup, or a face pack, or something to treat insect bites, in a matter of minutes. It was magical – real Harry Potter stuff.”
Sounds intriguing. Has anyone seen it? Drop us a line. And thanks to Tom for the tip.
LATER: Of course, traditional medicine is going mainstream in some places.
Tracing Paper had a fun mosaic of food-themed maps yesterday. We’ve blogged about a couple of them before, and lots more actually, as it’s a bit of an obsession around these parts, but it’s fun to see them all together like that. And while we’re on the subject of geography, I got 8 out of 9 on the beer geography quiz that was also concidentally on Mental Floss this week. Can you beat that?