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March 26, 2007

Domestication

Michael’s post on water buffalo genetic diversity and domestication reminded me that I was intending to point you all in the direction of Dienekes’ Anthropology Blog. Although Dienekes mainly blogs about the genetic diversity and evolution of humans, he does occasionally link to papers on animal domestication and related issues. He has an RSS feed, which makes it easy to monitor his blog. In the past couple of years he has pointed to interesting papers on:

Incidentally, a great paper reviewing the use of genetics and archaeology to document domestication came out last year and you can see the abstract here. Now, what’s really needed is for someone to bring together the human, livestock and crop genetic data.

March 25, 2007July 6, 2007

SINGER cartogram

Following my earlier post about cartograms, here’s one for the germplasm collections catalogued in SINGER, by country of origin. Thanks to Dr Robert Hijmans of IRRI for the birthday present.

March 23, 2007May 27, 2007

Linnaeus 2.0

Linnaeus was born 300 years ago. I’m not sure how many species he catalogued in his time, but his 21st century descendants at The Catalogue of Life have reached one million. I checked, and this does include some domesticated plants, but not, I think, in any systematic way. What they seem to have done at the Catalogue is to make it possible for users to search across 37 existing taxonomic databases, so if one or more of those include a particular crop species, you’ll get a hit if you search the Catalogue, and you’ll be directed to the original source of the data.

March 23, 2007March 23, 2007

Regulating biodiversity research

Hot on the heels of the new Brazilian system for tracking and regulating access to genetic resources comes news of a similar set-up in Peru. Read all about it – both of them, in fact – at SciDevNet.

March 22, 2007March 3, 2010

Cool cartograms

Cartograms are maps where the sizes of territories (countries, say) are proportional not to the surface area of their real-world counterparts, but rather to the value of some other attribute, like population or GDP or incidence of malaria. You can see lots of really wonderful examples on the Worldmapper website. That includes a few agricultural variables and some forestry stuff. Here’s an example of the former, net imports of vegetables by $ value.

As I said earlier in connection with Gapminder, wouldn’t it be great to be able to produce cartograms from FAOSTAT data? Or what about from the data in SINGER? Well actually that shouldn’t be all that difficult, the code for making your own cartograms is available, according to Worldmapper’s FAQ. Any volunteers?