- Songs raise awareness about aquatic invasive species. Jeremy says: Kill me now.
- Long, long post about climate change in Africa. Part 2 “coming soon”.
- Yemen prepares for climate change. Need a “strategy for the promotion of rain-fed agriculture”.
- Bananas from Iceland … Jeremy says: I don’t get it.
- New Agriculturist focuses on natural fibres.
The great Gatsby teaching resource
The Gatsby Charitable Foundation, which funds plant science research in the UK, established Gatsby Plants as a National Teaching Facility for Plant Sciences 4 years ago. The project has received continued funding until 2011.
Gatsby Plants aims to enthuse undergraduate students to study plant science further through two initiatives which expose them to the exciting developments in plant science and the scientists leading this research. These are:
- an annual Summer School for high-achieving 1st year undergraduate students from UK Universities
- a Teaching Resource providing plant science lecturers with access to novel and inspiring teaching material
Very worthy. I’ve been having a look at the teaching materials in particular. You need to register to get access.
The majority of materials have been kindly contributed by members of the plant science research community (see Terms of Use for how to credit their efforts). Gatsby Plants has also negotiated access to material from some commercial organisations and is actively involved in generating novel content.
There’s a number of lectures with definite agrobiodiversity interest, for example one by Prof. Peter Beyer, University of Freiburg, Germany on “Golden Rice on a Mission” and another from Dr Peter Craufurd on “Crop Science for Development: A Journey from the Laboratory to Farmers’ Fields in the Tropics.” And another: Prof. Monique Simmonds of Kew entitled “Plants in our Lives: from Beauty to Death.” You get a video of the lecturer delivering the talk, with accompanying slides. If you want your students to view the lecture you contact Gatsby Plants and they send you a username and password which allows access to a URL.
You also get practicals (there’s one on pea genetics), images and movies.
I would imagine they could be very useful to trainers, although I must say it would have been nice to be able to also download the presentation and adapt it to one’s particular situation and audience. Anyone out there with training resources on agricultural biodiversity to share? How about on CWRs, for example?
Nibbles: Taxonomy, Herbs, Animal domestication, Bio-char, Videos, French fries, Barcoding
- Plea from taxonomist to nutritionists and food people: use scientific names and get them right.
- Cooking writer doesn’t get the hint.
- New Scientist rounds up bunch of recent animal domestication studies.
- DIY bio-char; Muck & Mystery has some ideas.
- Diverseeds has videos of diverse seeds.
- “For one week, 2500 people from Noirmoutier use all their might to harvest this precious La Bonnotte potato by hand.”
- Barcoding bananas: useful for field genebanks?
A.B. Chapman Lectures in Animal Breeding and Genetics
I’m informed by DAD-Net that the A.B. Chapman Lectures in Animal Breeding and Genetics have been presented annually at the University of Wisconsis-Madison since 1994 by leading international scholars in the genetic improvement of animals, and that this year’s lectures were given by Prof. Miguel Angel Toro, Departamento de Produccion Animal, Universidad Politecnica de Madrid, Spain, on May 4 and 5. Prof. Toro gave two talks, on “Principles of Conservation of Animal Genetic Resources” and on “Mating Allocation in Genomic Selection.” Did anyone out there see them, in particular the first, either in person or live on the internet? Let us know. In any case, it looks like they’ll eventually be available for downloading.
Happy Birthday Kew
How many botanic gardens get such vast quantities of Google love? Or a birthday visit from the Queen of England? Kudos to Kew.