Information

June 2, 2009June 10, 2009

Carnival time

The latest (5th) Scientia pro Publica blog carnival is up at Pro-Science, offering a selection of blog posts that celebrate the “best science, nature and medical writing targeted to the public”. As ever, we scour the lists looking for things of an agricultural bent (no matter how vague). Overfishing Simplified… Then Complexified comes closest. Mauka to Makai follows some of the tangled webs that connect piscivores, and while definitely illuminating, it isn’t all that optimistic.

Later … Festival of the Trees is just out too, at Roundrock Journal. Lots of fruit stuff there. Seems to be a good day for nibbling fruit today.

June 2, 2009June 2, 2009

Nibble: Coconut, Punjab, Oak barrels, Schools, Podcasts, Origins squared, Apples, Fruit book

Coconut beetle attack in Cambodia.
Indian Green Revolutionary goes organic.
Forests leave fingerprint in wine.
School gardening in Ghana, farmer field school for women and children in Panama.
WWF launches podcast series “The Wild Things.” Bioversity to counter with “The Cultivated Things.”
Oldest pottery found in Chinese cave with oldest rice.
The transition to agriculture “was entered into slowly and reluctantly.” Evidence from the Netherlands, of all places.
Got an apple orchard? Wanna be a star?
Hunting down The Fruit Hunters.

June 2, 2009June 2, 2009

Hundreds of 100 questions

Gosh, it’s difficult to keep track of this stuff. There’s been an explosion of “one hundred most important questions facing X” initiatives in the past couple of years. These are the ones I was able to track down, listed in no particular order, but there may be others out there, in which case let us know.

I think the only one we actually blogged about here was the plant science one.

Anyway, I bring all this up because I’ve just heard that Professor Jules Pretty from Essex University is now spearheading an effort to summarize the world’s agricultural challenges down to the top 100 priority questions. Of course, the most interesting thing about these lists will be the intersection among them. Talk about bang for your buck.

June 1, 2009

“Global human sensor net” to be cast for biodiversity

Another attempt to harness the “wisdom of crowds” is in the offing. The eBiosphere informatics challenge is asking people around the world to send in observations of “species of interest.” That basically means mainly invasives and threatened species, for now. You can contribute photographs to Flickr or use Twitter or send an email. You don’t have to be a taxonomist: you’re asked to do your best on the identification, and they’ll bring experts in for confirmation. All the observations coming in will be integrated it with other scientific knowledge (e.g. taxonomy, maps, conservation status) on the species.

Now, if you’re a regular reader you’ll know this kind of approach is one we’ve occasionally contemplated here for crop wild relatives, landraces and other agrobiodiversity, in particular to monitor threats and erosion. So I’ll be watching closely.

May 31, 2009June 1, 2009

Not just wild plants in Eden

There’s also rice, for one thing. Check out the recent BBC video on the Eden Project: rice makes an appearance at about the 2:30 mark. A quick search of the website does suggest that agrobiodiversity is well represented in the Biomes. And you can definitely buy crop seeds in the shop. But I couldn’t find any references to crop wild relatives on the website, which seems a pity. Or have I missed something? Eden would seem to be a great opportunity for education and public awareness on CWRs.