Category: Information

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Resources on PNG food plants

Bruce French taught Food Crop Production at Vudal University in the 1970s and wrote a number of books on the food plants of PNG. These are now sadly out of print, but fear not. I’ll let him take up the story:

In recent years I have continued to put together information for PNG, along with my wider project of trying to describe all the food plants of the world. At this stage I have several books written, available as computerised books in pdf format, on Food Plants, Pests and Diseases and Food Composition for PNG. These are all available on the website, www.foodplantsinternational.com, and can be downloaded. As they are fairly large books, and may take a while to download, it may be easier for me to send them to people within PNG on DVD/CD. There are also other resources such as photos, databases, etc. that could also be made available. The information should be useful for agriculture workers, teachers, health workers and other interested people.

You can find the publications here. They’re wonderful.

Via Didinet Issue 8, 2008 (not online).

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African protected areas surveyed

The EU-funded “Assessment of African Protected Areas” is out:

The purpose of the work is to provide to decision makers a regularly updated tool to assess the state of Africa PAs and to prioritize them according to biodiversity values and threats so as to support decision making and fund allocation processes.

It is great stuff: detailed, standardized descriptions of the importance of — and threats faced by — each protected area in Africa. I wonder if something similar will ever be done for agricultural biodiversity. An interesting first step might be to mash these results with those of the recent survey of crop wild relatives in protected areas. Unfortunately, the agrobiodiversity and protected areas communities hardly ever speak to each other.

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Bee colony collapse disorder follow-up

This is important. If you care at all about colony collapse disorder, the way science is done, and the way results are reported, go to Ian Parnell’s What’s Your Ecotype and read his long and detailed report on the latest news concerning Israeli Acute Paralysis Virus, Australian bees and CCD in America. You’ll be glad you did, because you’ll be better informed than almost everyone else.

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Imagining the past

And another trifecta to round off the day, this one of stories about the historical remains of agrobiodiversity, in a broad sense.

We start with an article in Britain’s Daily Telegraph about a genetic study of the skulls of a couple of lions from the menagerie which medieval royalty maintained in the Tower of London. It turns out they were Barbary lions from North Africa, now sadly extinct. Ok, they’re not strictly speaking agricultural biodiversity, but it’s a fun story and I couldn’t resist it.

Next there’s news of an excavation in Egypt which revealed the buried remain of donkeys. I think we actually nibbled this a few days ago in another guise, but the NY Times article is worth reading. The find is interesting because although the donkeys were definitely used as pack animals (the evidence is wear and tear on the bones), they didn’t look any different from wild asses — at least as far as their bones are concerned. Certainly they were no smaller, and a rapid reduction in size has been seen as a marker of animal domestication — the domestication syndrome. So, time for a rethink there.

And, finally, the Boston Globe has a piece on an exhibition of Jewish mosaics from Roman North Africa, entitled “Tree of Paradise” because of its depictions of nature’s bounty. Ancient representations of plants and animals are fascinating, because they are really the only way we can know the external phenotype of old, extinct breeds and varieties. There are unfortunately no pictures in the article, and the exhibition website only has one. Pity.