- Vandana Shiva on Indian farmer suicides.
- Make mine a tejate.
More distributed fun
Our loyal reader will know I have a weakness for applications which harness the power of hordes of distributed internet users, especially if they involve mapping. There was the thing about digitizing herbarium sheets. And the thing about mapping photos of tomatoes. ((LATER: This just in from New Scientist.)) And of course there’s the Degree Confluence Project, which I thought I had blogged about but can’t find in our archives, so perhaps I didn’t, but I should.
The latest such project to come to my attention is called ScenicOrNot. The website presents you with a photograph of a location in Britain and you give it marks out of 10 for scenic beauty. Eventually, I suppose, there will be a map of scenic hotspots — and, for that matter, coldspots — but the developers are cagey about exactly why they are doing this. All fun enough, and possibly even useful, though I’m struggling to think of the agrobiodiversity relevance.
The photographs used by ScenicOrNot come from Geograph, which is doing a similar thing to the Degree Confluence Project, but only for Britain rather than the whole world. The idea is to document with a photograph every 1x1km grid square in the country: “8,570 users have contributed 1,267,685 images covering 242,182 grid squares, or 73.0% of the total.” Exploring that incredible resource does turn up some things of agricultural biodiversity interest. Check out, for example, the oast houses of Britain. The Degree Confluence dataset has been used to ground-truth a Global Map of Rainfed Cropland Areas. Not sure if a similar fate awaits the much denser British dataset.
Swine flu roundup
As the numbers keep mounting, it is worth recalling where it all started. The epicentre of the swine flu outbreak seems to be the village of La Gloria in Veracruz. The Times has been there, of course: ((And also The Guardian, to be fair.))
Residents of La Gloria have long complained about the clouds of flies that are drawn the so-called “manure lagoons†created by such mega-farms, known in the agriculture business as Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs).
But they may or may not be behind the outbreak. In any case, CAFOs seem to be very different to the more traditional methods of pig rearing to be found in Mexico. The area is one of high density of production:
No word on which of the nine or so pig breeds recorded from Mexico are involved.
LATER: GRAIN has its say. And New Scientist.
Brussels hearts vultures
No sooner do we nibble a scientific paper describing how traditional transhumance supports ecosystems, and in particular vulture populations, than the EU parliament passes legislation allowing farmers to leave carcasses on their land. It’s great to be heard in Brussels!
Nibbles: James McWilliams, Flowering plant origins, Moon plant, Satellites
- “Should we be working to create local foodsheds in areas that have to import water in order to be fertile?” Dude, you had me at foodsheds.
- Endosperm “made human civilization possible.”
- First plant on moon a brassica?
- Eye in sky finds missing sweet potatoes.
- Can you think of a better way to use a rooftop than to grow rice on it and then to brew sake? Didn’t think so.