Mainstream

Nibbles: All singing and dancing, FAO meets Big Data, Clone this, Patent nonsense, Frozen fish

Fisherfolk of the Amazon landed on film. But do they sing about it? (And it’s not just an Amazon thing, this dancing and singing about agrobiodiversity. Not by any means.) And should they be doing more slashing-and-burning?
FAO to put all its data in one basket. But including AnGR? WIEWS? One asks more in hope than expectation.
One of the many challenges of vegetatively propagated crops (like potatoes): rapid multiplication. (Well, they could always do an SNP-based tetraploid map of the damn things, couldn’t they.) No such problems with seeds, of course.
There’s been a rapid increase in the patenting of adaptation-related traits, and the private sector in industrialized countries is mainly responsible. Well there’s a surprise. But was that discussed at the CCAFS meeting on breeding objectives for Africa? And it’s just as well to remember that it’s not just breeding that’s needed. Oh, but by the way, you better grab those adaptations while you can…
Regional SE Asian fish genebank proposed. That I’d love to see. Maybe they could share germplasm with, I dunno, Chicago? And not just.

Cali, a photo by luigig on Flickr.

Nice to have such a variety of local fruit and other agrobiodiversity products on the ice-cream menu in Cali, Colombia. But peanut? Cheese?

GBIF makes its move.
Homaging the seed.
Learning sustainability from old Amazonian farmers. Really old. Really, really old.
Yet another Aussie genebank. Or maybe the same one, I’ve lost track. And interest.
Where climate data comes from.
Maine’s fiber community, what, exposed? Unveiled? Uncovered? And similar from Bolivia.
REDD+ will save us all.
Don’t crack open the mead to celebrate the solution to colony collapse disorder just yet.
All things Capsicum on one handy website.
Whole bunch of policy briefs on African seed systems. Don’t know if I’ll ever have the time to read through the lot, but cursory perusal suggests the following bottom line: the market can’t do it all by itself.

Design guru talks botany. Latest plant getting the treatment is the Hawaiian Cotton Tree. Which, despite its name, really is a (remote) cotton wild relative.
What has Next Generation Sequencing ever done for me? And what you should know about how it works.
And here’s an example of it at work: different cultivated cotton species have behaved differently, genetically speaking.
That used ancient DNA, this one didn’t, but I guess a future one on chiles might. LATER: Ooops, just realized this is old. So what was it doing in my RSS feed?
Speaking of chiles, here’s a couple of more things on Native American agriculture.
Free access to the first issue of volume 20 of Journal for Nature Conservation for the next 12 months.
Rebuilding the genebank in Ivory Coast.
Discovering the wonders of the coconut. Their headline, not mine.
The latest news from the John Innes Centre’s genebank.
Fancy a tulip? To eat, that is.

Good news from Russia: A genebank in the permafrost. Yup, another one.
Good news from Guatemala: Urban gardens for health and wealth.
Good news from West Africa (which we know is not a country): magic cassava.
Good news from Brazil: the World Congress on Justice, Governance and Law for Environmental Stability will prevent empty promises being made at Rio+20.
Good news from the US: the Edible Schoolyard Project is online with scads of fun stuff for children and their teachers everywhere.