Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
Our cartography nut is otherwise engaged, temporarily, but I know he’d love this one. Blue shows agricultural production consumed directly by people: food. Orange-red is consumed indirectly in processed products, mostly feed for livestock but also things like cotton and coffee. Notice anything interesting about the distribution? Yeah, me too.
Hat tip to Resilience Science, which gives links to the original study.
XML SOAP names are available from the Biodiversity Heritage Library: no geeks available for comment (but I suspect this could be important).
Tangled Bank 94 is up at Life before Death, full of biological diversity and goodness. Best part about it? The host is a bee-keeper! (I think I may have apiarist-envy.) She hasn’t actually posted on bees since 28 September, but it is winter so there can’t be all that much to write. I would love to have an expert’s view on the latest news on Colony Collapse Disorder in the US, which is that it is not the result of bees imported from Australia carrying a virus imported from Israel.
I’m at IRRI in the Philippines the whole week (and the next, actually, but that’s another story) for a workshop to develop a global ex situ conservation strategy for rice genetic resources. More on that later. Right now, I just wanted to show you a photo I took today during a rice variety tasting the T.T. Chang Genetic Resources Centre laid on. There were about 20 different genotypes from around the world: normal and fragrant, white and black, loose and very sticky. They included Carolina Gold, which I blogged about a few days ago. It’s amazing how different rice varieties can taste.
Truckers want healthy foods. Yeah, right.