Mother Earth News has an online seed finder. It lets you search the “online catalogs of more than 500 mail order seed companies,” mainly in the US, presumably. Test it out and let them know if you could or couldn’t find what you were looking for. We might need to send them our seed list…
Access to academic journals
Noodling around Googlespace I’m often brought up short when a published paper is part of JSTOR, because access is restricted to those who can pay for the privilege. ((No matter that your taxes may have already paid for the research.)) Now, via the CAPRi blog, comes news that JSTOR is opening itself up to more developing countries through its Developing Nations Access Initiative. Go ahead and ask, if you may be eligible. Meanwhile, we’ll consider relocating ourselves.
Nibbles: Info-fest, Medicinals, Wiliwili, Fish, Salinity
- 10,000,000 pages of biodiversity: among them 84 articles on agriculture.
- The road to scientific expertise for Maryam Imbumi began with a stomach ache.
- It’s wasp versus wasp to save native wiliwili.
- Domesticating big fish in the Amazon. Really big.
- Indian institute churning out salt-tolerant varieties.
Nothing succeeds like success
So if you know “policies, programs, and investments in pro-poor agricultural development that have had a proven impact on hunger and food security,” the International Food Policy Research Institute would like to hear from you. To submit a nomination or nominations for “Millions Fed: Proven Successes in Agricultural Development,” please visit the IFPRI website
CWR and medicinal species in botanic gardens
Suzanne Sharrock of Botanic Gardens Conservation International (BGCI) has left a very interesting comment on our post a couple of day ago about the overlap between wild medicinal plants and wild crop relatives. Rather than letting it languish in obscurity, I’m reproducing it below:
At BGCI we have developed a list of around 3,000 plant species that are used for medicinal purposes. Of these, we know that 1,802 are in cultivation in botanic gardens and this list can be easily extracted from our PlantSearch database. Simply select “medicinal plants” and the list of medicinal plants that are in cultivation in botanic gardens is displayed. On this list, plants that are also CWR are marked (according to a list of CWR genera). If you download the list, it can be easily be manipulated in excel so you can extract those species (164 species) that are both medicinal plants and crop wild relatives and are in cultivation in botanic gardens.
If anyone is interested, we could provide the full list of plants that are on both our medicinal and CWR lists — not just those in cultivation in botanic gardens.