- Seed bank saves Alabama heirloom varieties, y’all.
- Retrotransposons go wild in sunflower. Kansas to the rescue.
- Avocados and gomphotheres. Apples and bears. Welcome back, Evil Fruit Lord!
- More about the IAASTD and its paradigm shift thing.
Momi-2008
The latest of Mitsuaki Tanabe’s monuments to wild rice was unveiled in the FAO building in Rome yesterday. Tanabe has donated this sculpture to the Global Crop Diversity Trust, and it is now installed by a window just in front of the Trust’s offices. Representing a seed of Oryza meridionalis, which is found in northern Australia, “Momi-2008” is about 9 m long and about 250 kg in weight. It took 20 men to get it up the stairs. This photo doesn’t really do it justice.
Nibbles: Tangled Bank
- If you’re here from Tangled Bank 102, welcome. Go vote, please. If you’re here anyway, go read Tangled Bank.
- Bleeding canker threatens British horse chestnuts.
- Meanwhile, in the Netherlands, fertilizers threaten the Drumstick Truffleclub.
- Michael Pollan welcomes higher food prices. And more on his new book on “nutritionism”: eat food (not individual nutrients); mostly plant-derived; in reasonable amounts.
- Breadfruit balls anyone? Try charging more for that delicacy, Michael!
- Or, indeed, this. Or any of these for that matter.
- The weird food stuff just keeps on coming. Now there’s buzz about camel cheese. And a Peanut Lolita to help it down?
- Horizon scanning spots 25 novel threats to biodiversity in UK. Agrobiodiversity apparently totally safe. Phew.
Nibbles: cats, pulses, cherries
- The World Cat Congress is on. Hipsters hanging out, smoking dope, listening to jazz, I imagine. Very select, though.
- Canadian boffins evaluate nutritional differences among pulse cultivars. Regular readers recognize leitmotif.
- Celebrity chefs try to save British cherry orchards. Madame Ranevskaya happy to hear it.
African protected areas surveyed
The EU-funded “Assessment of African Protected Areas” is out:
The purpose of the work is to provide to decision makers a regularly updated tool to assess the state of Africa PAs and to prioritize them according to biodiversity values and threats so as to support decision making and fund allocation processes.
It is great stuff: detailed, standardized descriptions of the importance of — and threats faced by — each protected area in Africa. I wonder if something similar will ever be done for agricultural biodiversity. An interesting first step might be to mash these results with those of the recent survey of crop wild relatives in protected areas. Unfortunately, the agrobiodiversity and protected areas communities hardly ever speak to each other.