Bug Girl has pulled the plug on her blog, which is a crying shame. As a tribute, and to show you why I enjoyed it (even though I didn’t often link to it) here’s a link to the post that first brought Bug Girl to my notice: Cochineal: it’s a bug AND a feature. Enjoy it while you can, and join me in hoping Bug Girl can be tempted back.
Desert botany
As we’ve said before, we like blog carnivals. They expose us to new things, and they expose new people to our things. And that is why, despite the frequent lack of direct agricultural interest, we’re always happy to point you to the carnivals that have been good enough to feature our posts.
Berry Go Round no. 14 is up at Gravity’s Rainbow, where there is a bouquet of posts on topics ranging from Darwin’s tree ferns to baby’s breath ((Another accursed common name; Gypsophila elegans, if you please.)) If you fancy submitting something for next time, when the carnival will be hosted at A Neotropical Savanna, you’ve got till the end of the month.
The second edition of Carnival of the Arid is up too, at Coyote Crossing, which is where it started. Some wonderful photographs at Gossamer Tapestry. Maybe some of those are wild relatives? And maybe one of the desert rats over there in the American southwest can shed some light on the true history of Luigi’s mysterious millennial Anasazi beans.
We’re shameless enough to have sent our Sudanese trees to Festival of the Trees No. 33, which is also up at local ecologist. There’s enough there to satisfy the craziest tree hugger, including a little something on alder cones. I hope Michael Bell, who commented recently on his plan to develop alder as a grain crop, is watching. Again, submitting is easy, and again you’ve got till the end of the month.
Breeding news galore
The latest Plant Breeding News is out. There’s a huge number of interesting tidbits in it this month, including announcements for a number of major international conferences. But I’ll just highlight a web site that I think I may have linked to before but certainly bears mentioning again: PlantStress:
…the purpose of this web site is to serve as a brokerage of information, a meeting place, a consultation facility and a source for professional update on the most important issues of plant environmental (abiotic) stress. While the site is dynamic and constantly updated it also offers basic educational materials to newcomers into this area who wish to use the site for learning. The most important goal of this web site is to promote interaction among those interested in solving the problem of plants under stress in agriculture, be it scientists, extension specialists, business people, administrators, policy makers or farmers.
It includes a useful page of news, announcements and events, although unfortunately it does not have an RSS feed.
Aquaculture podcast
Doug Burdette talks about the history of aquaculture over at Agricultural Innovations, Inc. More to come next week, apparently.
Better early warning needed
Over the years Baloch lost 250 acres of cultivable land to the sea, some 50 buffaloes and around 80 goats. “Altogether my family lost 3,500 acres. We were once considered big landlords in this place with farmers working for us. We even paid tax to the government. Now we don’t even have even an acre to plough,” he says wistfully.
According to the revenue department, 86 percent of the 235,485 acres of fertile land in Kharo Chhan has been swallowed by the sea. The population, over the past decade, has declined from 15,000 to 5,000.
I come across this kind of statement all the time: stories of the possible disappearance, by implication at least, of agricultural biodiversity. Maybe because I’m looking out for them. This happens to come from an article on the Indus delta in Pakistan, but another recent one was from Cameroon. There should be a way of keeping track of such threats, shouldn’t there? And verify them. And maybe — the horror! — eventually do something about them perhaps.
But wait, there is! That’s what the early warning part of FAO’s World Information and Early Warning System is supposed to be doing. Too bad it isn’t. You could argue that the fault lies with the WIEWS network of focal points. But you can’t blame it too much on them. Those forms for reporting threats to landraces, crop wild relatives and ex situ collections are deadly, aren’t they. Why not a lighter, online, interactive, map-based system? You — that is, anybody — leave a marker on a Google Maps interface and link to a web page or document, or maybe just an observation you made during a vacation trip.
Kind of like we do here. Except that we can’t, using our current system, map only the posts dealing with genetic erosion. But maybe it’s a model WIEWS should be looking at? The technology is certainly there. Maybe there are national-level or local-level systems that are using this kind of approach? Let us know.
LATER: And here’s another example.