Nibbles

Nibbles: Plant data, Wild relatives, Citizen science, Danish pig breed, Fruit names, Genebanks big and small, Taxonomy, Seaweed, Weather data, IPR training, Caribbean & Pacific, Potato research at Birmingham, Taro training in PNG, BioAreas

Latest Plant Press has interesting stuff on botanical data of various forms. Always worth a skim.
CSA pamphlet on the importance of crop wild relatives. Why does this feel like a bandwagon? And how long to the backlash?
And talking of bandwagons, here’s the latest from the one on citizen botany. Does indigenous tree knowledge count as citizen science? How about indigenous weed knowledge?
And how about using your pet pig to reinvigorate a breed?
Interesting take on fruit variety names. Can we crowdsource an answer?
Everything about the opening of that new Mexican mega-genebank. Including the speeches. Nice-looking building, I must say. And from IRRI an example of a genebank from the other end of the scale in the Philippines. And similar, but different, from ~~Canada~~ Colorado.
Biodiversity bigshots beg for naming blitz. Better hurry. And don’t forget the soil.
Sargasso Sea coming ashore in Ghana is bad news for fisherfolk. Can they not eat it? Is it bad to ask that?
How to find your way around weather data.
Swedes to provide IPR training for PGR types.
Island nations from opposite sides of the world brought together by agrobiodiversity. Full disclosure: I’ve worked with both regional PGR networks and want to again.
Brits who worked on spuds.
And Wontoks who worked on taro.
Privatizing conservation.

I’ve already pre-ordered Darwinian Agriculture, and now I can get a head start by downloading Chapter 1 for free.
Oxfam gives Vietnamese new watermelon seeds to combat climate change. But what kind of seeds?
Relive yesterday’s webinar on Managing pests and disease under climate change: What do we need to learn?
Speaking of which, a reminder of CABI’s New Pest & Disease Records.
New use for lime juice: disinfecting drinking water.
Fermentation Nation feat. my favorite microorganisms.
Mexico toys with new plant variety protection law, NGOs worried.
Finally, overworked person updates agrobiodiversity group on Mendeley.

Transgenic American Chestnuts on trial, as it were.
1st International Symposium on Jackfruit and other Moraceae to take place 31 August-2 September. Don’t expect access to the papers if you can’t be there. h/t CFF.
Breadfruit better than DEET at deterring mosquitoes. Tastier too.
Crawford Fund opening up opportunities for coconut oil producers.
History of the potato among the Basques. Well, why not?
Microkhan disembowels the rat-meat trade of Mozambique.

Fisherfolk of the Amazon landed on film. But do they sing about it? (And it’s not just an Amazon thing, this dancing and singing about agrobiodiversity. Not by any means.) And should they be doing more slashing-and-burning?
FAO to put all its data in one basket. But including AnGR? WIEWS? One asks more in hope than expectation.
One of the many challenges of vegetatively propagated crops (like potatoes): rapid multiplication. (Well, they could always do an SNP-based tetraploid map of the damn things, couldn’t they.) No such problems with seeds, of course.
There’s been a rapid increase in the patenting of adaptation-related traits, and the private sector in industrialized countries is mainly responsible. Well there’s a surprise. But was that discussed at the CCAFS meeting on breeding objectives for Africa? And it’s just as well to remember that it’s not just breeding that’s needed. Oh, but by the way, you better grab those adaptations while you can…
Regional SE Asian fish genebank proposed. That I’d love to see. Maybe they could share germplasm with, I dunno, Chicago? And not just.

On farm conservation; Bioversity is really good at it. (And I sometimes make a linking mistake; mea maxima culpa.)
Economics of plant genetic resource management for adaptation to climate change. What’s the bottom line? No idea.
Something else Bioversity is really good at: newsletters.
Using GIS to help communities map vegetable production and marketing in Bangkok. I like the acronym: V-GIS.
The variety of non-chile peppers.
Older fruits better. Quentin Crisp unavailable for comment.