Nibbles

Nibbles: Cluster archive, Plant Press, Yet more quinoa, African viruses, African veggies, Slum livestock, Protected area monitor, Chinese rice variety, Talking shops, PGR course

Another website archiving phylogenetic trees? What are the odds? Well, they are different animals.
Did we ever link to The Plant Press? If not, we should have.
The quinoa controversy rumbles on. We’ve got that covered too. And since you’re at it, why not help revise the descriptors?
Bad news for Africa: plant viruses. Ah but there are varieties for that problem, no? No? Well, you can always highlight the little blighters as research priorities.
Good news for Africa: local vegetables.
Sort of good news for Africa, I guess: livestock in slums.
New website keeps an eye on Protected Area Downgrading, Downsizing, and Degazettement. Interactively, natch. Well, actually, not so much. Can’t export, or import. Maybe the mash-up will fix that. Anyway, most protected areas are in the wrong place, aren’t they?
Conserving Chinese rice, one variety at the time.
Latest installment of The Economist’s Feeding the World thing is happening right now, and you can follow it on Twitter using #feedingtheworld. Or maybe you’d like to re-imagine agriculture with the CGIAR instead?
Apply for the latest installment of Wageningen’s PGR course.

You saw it in Brainfood first, but now you can read a whole post about that paper linking tree species diversity with ecosystem services in ConservationBytes.
Natural England launches an app competition. Me, I’d like to see this in an app (cf Australia). Mainly because I remember the days when we had to make such species distribution maps by hand.
WCMC already has plenty of apps, it seems. As does CABI.
Aquatic genetic resources getting catalogued, as a prelude to improved. Maybe they need apps?
RBGE staff have more than an app for capturing data from herbarium sheets. They have a poster.
Bet these Smithsonian guys had neither.
Nor did they have Facebook pages, but the iCONic project does. And I’m sure it will help with protecting those iconic conifers. Geddit?
CIMMYT replies to my query about where those Turkish landraces are going to be conserved. And ACIAR to my query about Timor Leste. What did we do before Twitter?
We would never have got Ghana interested in improved cowpea varieties from Burkina Faso quite so fast before Twitter is my guess. And if the links to the tweets behind these three stories expire, you’ll be pleased to know I’ve storified them. And then had to unsatisfactorily export them to PDF when that website died.
And Eurisco gets an RSS feed to go with that email newsletter!

Natural History Museum wants a wikipedian. So, in a different way, does Crops for the Future.
The poetry of New York cheese labels.
Another crop genome bites the dust.
Kew contemplates the snake gourd.
Now you can outsource your experiments.
Strange bedfellows: small organic farmers and the Tea Party, a marriage made in Nebraska.
Got research on underutilized species (or indeed sustainable food chains) you think you might like to publish?
The OECD publishes a huge study of the biology of Brassica crops. Yes, the OECD.

Patrick reckons black salsify (aka Scorzonera hispanica, or just plain scorzonera) will be “the next ‘powerfood’ in the US”. It certainly is delicious, but I reckon it needs some serious breeding to make it worthwhile.
CABI news on pests and diseases; there’s a new banana wilt in town that would worry me.
Oh no! Ammunition for the deforestation deniers. “[R]research flaw that has likely exaggerated the impact of logging in tropical forests“.
Oh yes! The yak is back.
Oh no! Elsevier launches new journal: Global Food Security. Freely available (for now).

Fox News discovers mopane worms. Oh hum. This comes around very regularly, doesn’t it.
More allegedly innovative solutions to tackling something called the food security nexus. Which apparently doesn’t include trade. How about mopane worms?
Or bamboo? Or jackfruit?
Horizon scan of emerging conservation issues discussed by author and tweep Prof. Sutherland in PlanetEarth podcast. No, mopane worms didn’t make the list.
Davos participants step away from buffet (no word on whether featuring mopane) long enough to disagree about obesity.
How long to a multilateral system for mopane? Or bamboo for that matter.
Do we need a wiki for information on GMOs? Have your say at Biofortified. I would personally like to see one on mopane worms.
Domesticating Allanblackia. Maybe you could grow mopane worms on it when you’re done?
Sick of mopane worms? How about an indigestable report on the First Asia Dairy Goat Conference?