- You’ve heard of alternative lifestyles? Now read all about alternative pollinators.
- Why should we spend money digitizing natural history collections?
- Not all quinoa cultivars may be good for celiacs.
- The largest comparative growth experiment ever. Hope some of the 600+ species are crop wild relatives.
- Mangroves trap heavy metals. And sequester a lot of carbon. But they are moving. Thank goodness there’s lots of ways to value the services they provide.
- CABI’s Plantwise Knowledge Bank is online.
- Kew boffins blow up coffee. The genus, settle down.
Nibbles: Genebanks on the edge
Nibbles: Climate change data, Transcriptomics, Food industry trends, Gelato event
- Climate Adaptation Country Profiles from the World Bank. Better than you might think.
- You don’t need the whole genome, apparently. Now they tell us.
- Where the global food industry is going. Some opportunities there if you think agrodiversity is important, Shirley.
- Wait, there’s a 6-day international event on gelato?
Nibbles: ITPGRFA consultation, Organic Wageningen, Rice good and bad, HarvestXXX, Genebank education, Ethnobiology teaching, YPARD, Wild coffee prospecting, Banana & cereal genomics, In vitro award, Coca Cola and conservation, Sam Dryden, Samara, Taro in Hawaii, Biodiversity and languages, Ancient food
- ITPGRFA launches stakeholder consultation on sustainable use. First order of business: figure out what the heck it is.
- Maybe Wageningen’s new professor of organic agriculture will know.
- IRRI finds healthy rice. Meanwhile, out on the front lines…
- HarvestPlus puts out an annual report. HarvestChoice gets to grips with lablab. Yeah I find the whole HarvestFillintheblank thing confusing too.
- Nature Education does genebanks. “Ex situ conservation appears to be effective; in situ conservation has few proponents except those who practice it out of necessity.” Whoa, easy, tiger!
- And speaking of education, here are some teaching resources in ethnobiology.
- Some of which may be useful to interesting yoofs in agriculture?
- Raiders of the Lost Coffee Bean? I would have avoided the Indiana Jones parallel, frankly.
- How banana and cereals genomics is going to get us all personal jetpacks.
- In the meantime, a banana tissue culture expert nabs ICAR Punjabrao Deshmukh Outstanding Woman Scientist Award 2011.
- What new technologies would most benefit conservation? DNA and IT, mostly, apparently, naturally.
- Coca Cola sustainable agriculture guy mentions pollinator biodiversity but not citrus biodiversity.
- Profile of the head of agriculture at the Gates Foundation.
- Kew’s Samara does mountain biodiversity, crop wild relatives and much more besides.
- Taro research in Hawaii summarized in a nice PDF.
- Biological and linguistic diversity go together like a, what, horse and carriage?
- The medieval fall of the Irish cow. And the Harappan origins of the curry. Esoteric, moi?
Nibbles: Late blight, Drought, Diversification, Food prices, Long-horn cattle, Bean selection, UK to grow exotics
- You say potatoes, I say tomatoes; either way, the blight gonna get them. LATER: Ok, there was a second link to Rodale.com from “tomatoes”, but that seems to have disappeared, and here’s the story on that, thanks to Jesse.
- A huge haul of links to current articles about the drought in the US, and much else besides.
- And a smattering of ideas that farmers could adopt to improve production and conservation, in the US and perhaps elsewhere too.
- Speaking of which, goodish – or not-so-bad – news on food prices.
- Longhorn cattle: a selection of good-looking pictures. ILRI to flood Flickr with African longhorns?
- Good-looking beans find favour with Ugandan farmers.
- UK curry eaters looking forward to climate change, the fools.