Category: Information

Posted on

“Edible Expeditions” exhibition excites exceedingly

The Conservatory of Flowers in San Francisco, “North America’s oldest existing public conservatory,” has an exhibition on until November called “Edible Expeditions.”

It’s a chance to see food in the wild as visitors take a discovery journey of edible plants from around the world. Arranged in lush demonstration gardens, Edible Expeditions highlights the many delicious products that we enjoy from tropical countries like chocolate, vanilla, coffee, rice and spices galore. Interactive demonstrations help visitors understand how their food goes from vine to dine. And families will enjoy the many hands on Edibilicious activities that allow children to explore tropical roots, fruits, leaves and seeds with their senses.

Sounds great, but we’d like to hear about it firsthand. If anybody out there goes, let us know what you thought of it. Via.

Posted on

Press alerted as to importance of agrobiodiversity

USDA had a nice press release out yesterday about the importance of conserving crop diversity. The example used is the Russian wheat aphid threat to the United States back in 1986. But why do this just now? In preparation for the Third Session of the Governing Body of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture? But that’s two weeks away. Maybe for the International Day of Biodiversity? That’s still a week away, though. I don’t get it. I like it: the time is always right to bang on about plant genetic resources conservation. But I don’t get it.

Posted on

Agricultural biodiversity weblogger awarded prize

Our friend, colleague and occasional contributor Andy Jarvis has just won GBIF’s prestigious Ebbe Nielsen Prize for 2009 for “combining biosystematics and biodiversity informatics research in an exciting and novel way”. A lot of his work has been on the spatial analysis of the geographic distributions of crop wild relatives, with a view to developing strategies and priorities for their conservation, in particular in the context of climate change. A lot, but far from all: Andy is nothing if not versatile, and his interests extend to the whole of agrobiodiversity. A recent interview with Andy, and others, tries to answer the question “why maps?”. Congratulations to Andy!

Posted on

VIR at war

I’m going to have to take back what I said about English Russia. Just a couple of days after it featured old photos of Russian agriculture, today there’s more of agrobiodiversity interest. Sergei Larenkov mashes up images of modern St Petersburg with photos taken during the siege. Below is one of St Isaac’s Square. There are several others. It was a cabbage patch during the war. The building in the middle is — and was — part of the Vavilov Institute.

vir1
Compare it with the picture I took recently.

Posted on

Opposing the Egyptian pig cull

I posted my recent little note about the imminent disappearance of the Egyptian pig landrace called Baladi to DAD-Net, and it has generated quite a bit of feedback. The gist is that nobody thinks the cull is justified, and that conservation measures are urgently needed (freezing sperm and keeping it in liquid nitrogen and freezing or vitrifying embryos at the time of slaughter were mentioned). Especially since, surprisingly, the breed has never been properly characterized. An Egyptian researchers lamented this by saying that

characterization needs commitment and funds which are not readily available even for more economically important livestock species.

So that’s not unlike the case with crops, then. You can sign up to a petition to stop the cull.