From IAALD, news of a specialized search engine. The Plant Management Network — a gathering of mostly land grant colleges in the US, by the look of it — has a single point of entry to search the information of all members of the network. I’m not sure how useful this will be, as I don’t have any genuine queries to make, and it seems very US biased, but someone out there might find it useful.
Wiki on climate change and biodiversity
We have been contacted by David Wiedenfeld with news of a wiki-style site with the objective of aggregating information about biodiversity conservation and climate change. It will mainly focus on wild biodiversity, but material on agricultural biodiversity will be welcome. You can find David’s wiki here. Sounds like a great idea, good luck with it!
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.
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.
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.