Plant Breeding Electronic Journal Club launched

Just in from GBIP.

The GIPB Knowledge Resource Center is launching the Plant Breeding Electronic Journal Club, a virtual place that allows communities to meet and critically evaluate plant breeding and related fields’ articles in the scientific literature.

This e-Journal Club is directed to professionals and students interested in discussing relevant plant breeding themes and issues.   Its majors objectives are to help improve skills of understanding and debating current topics of interest to plant breeding and to promote intellectually stimulating and  professionally rewarding exchange with colleagues from around the world.

This e-Journal Club will use Fireboard, a forum component fully integrated to the GIPB website, which allows implementation of many e-Journal Club groups simultaneously. Dr. Fred Bliss kindly agreed to serve as the convener of this first GIPB e-Journal Club, which will discuss the article “Quantitative  Genetics, Genomics, and the Future of Plant Breeding” by Dr. Bruce Walsh.

In order to participate you just need to follow the instructions in the front page of the GIPB website.  Registration is now opened and the e-Journal Club will start on Wednesday, 6 August 2008.

Please, note that discussion in this first e-Journal Club will be held in English, but proposals of conveners willing to start e-Journal Clubs in other languages can be sent to gipb@fao.org.

Nibbles: Qat, Tomato, Climate change squared, Documentation, Food diaspora, Mapping Africa, Gout, Chicken origins, HealthMap, Olive, Crop mixtures

Biodiversity Festival

This just in from Crocevia.

Dear Friends,

Greetings from Rome. We are very proud to present you the fifth edition of the International Audiovisual Festival on Biodiversity, a funded project of Centro Internazionale Crocevia taking place in Rome on 24th and 25th October.

The Festival was born to promote experiences and activities that NGOs and local partners worldwide are carrying out to protect the environment and, in particular, its biodiversity. During the festival, national and international documentaries related to the environment, biodiversity and food sovereignty will be presented, followed by performances of local artists famous for their social commitment and special attention they give to the local traditions.

For the first time this year, the participating documentaries will be also available on-line on ARCOIRIS TV http://www.arcoiris.tv/. During two weeks before the official event in Rome, the audience will thus have the chance to see the videos and participate at the festival by choosing their favourite documentary.

We would like you to promote among your partners or in your website the festival and video request, as we would be pleased to include your last works in our event. Please don’t hesitate to contact us for further request or info.

Best regards,

Centro Internazionale Crocevia

Nibbles: Diversified farming, Appropriate crops, Alcohol, IPR