Predicting the effects of climate change on biodiversity is very much a growth industry, and understandably so. I’ve contributed to it myself (together with lots of friends), as I immodestly noted here in a previous posting. Many studies have predicted drastic increases in rates of extinctions, but then, why have so few species gone extinct during the past 2.5 millions years of recurring ice ages? This “Quaternary conundrum” is addressed in a new paper announced, and available for downloading, here. The conclusion of the 19 co-authors is that current approaches do not adequately take into account the factors which allow species to persist when conditions change for the worse. They make eight recommendations for improving predictions, ranging from better models to better validation of model results. Well worth reading.
Coconut brandy
A bottle of brandy “distilled from the essence of the coconut flower and … matured for a minimum of two years” is going for sale for a million bucks. Talk about value adding!
Visualizing data
Stop press: Google bought Gapminder yesterday. Thanks Patchwork Planet. Still no sign of any good Ag data though.
Google has started hosting Gapminder, a wonderful tool for visualizing development data developed by a Swedish NGO. Here’s an example of what you can do with it. Worth playing around with. But to see a master at work, check this out. There are only a few variables at the moment, but wouldn’t it be great if one day the data in FAOSTAT were to be added? Anyone want to volunteer to do the mash-up?
Swiss cows to go cold turkey
So apparently Swiss farmers will no longer be able to feed cannabis to their cows. Bummer.
An appreciation of the importance of crop diversity
There’s an important post entitled Vegetables of Mass Destruction over at The Daily Kos, a blog. Important not so much for the content, most of which is familiar, well-meaning and just a tad parochial, but for the location. The Daily Kos is one of the most popular sites in the blogosphere, averaging around half a million visits a day. If just some of those readers go away with a slightly better appreciation of the value of agricultural biodiversity, that will be A Good Thing. So thanks to cookiebear and The Daily Kos for their support.