- New Year Resolution No. 1: Take the mashua survey.
- New Year Resolution No. 2: Give the Food Programme a break, it can be not bad. As in the case of the recent episode featuring Irish Seed Savers and the only uniquely British veg.
- New Year Resolution No. 3: Learn to appreciate hour-plus talks by CG Centre DGs. And other publicity stunts…
- New Year Resolution No. 4: Give a damn about the next genome. Well, actually…
- New Year Resolution No. 5: Try to understand what people think may be going on with malnutrition in India. If anything.
- New Year Resolution No. 6: Marvel at new maps without fretting about how difficult to use they may be.
- New Year Resolution No. 7: Do not snigger at the British honours system.
- New Year Resolution No. 8: Disengage from the whole are-GMOs-good-or-bad? thing. It’s the wrong question, and nobody is listening anyhow.
- New Year Resolution No. 9: Ignore the next lactose tolerance evolution story. They’re all the same.
- New Year Resolution No. 10: Stop obsessing about beer. But not yet. No, not yet.
- Happy 2013!
Severe, grave and philosophical
That, we are told by the BBC’s Material World presenter Quentin Cooper, is what Jonathan Swift thought coffee makes us. And I for one would agree with Mr Cooper that it is indeed also how Dr Aaron Davis, Head of Coffee Research at Kew Gardens, and global crop wild relative expert Dr Nigel Maxted, from the University of Birmingham, came over in an interview with him yesterday. It’s all because of that Kew study on the effects of climate change on wild arabica, which is really making the rounds, not least thanks to the BBC. You can download the whole podcast, but we’ve taken the liberty of filleting out the 10 minutes of the programme which feature Drs Davis and Maxted, with many thanks to the BBC. More background on crop wild relatives in Europe from the PGR Secure and the older PGR Forum project website. IUCN has a Red List. There’s a Global Portal. And a big global project on crop wild relatives too. Who says these things are not getting enough attention?
Read that paper on Arachis, Vigna and Solanum Nigel alluded to.
And dream about attending that FAO workshop he mentioned for next week.
Nibbles: Wasabi, Plant name checker, Finding birds, GFAR videos, Sweet potato pap, Taro genebank
- Up to their knees in wasabi. And, loving it.
- iPlant Collaborative’s Taxonomic Name Resolution Service (TNRS) ver. 3.0 expands its coverage.
- Marine bird e-Atlas goes live. Meah.
- GFAR tweets about old videos. Must be a reason for it.
- Podcast on using sweet potatoes in baby food. Might well come in useful more generally.
- My friend Valerie and former employer SPC get a namecheck in story about world’s largest taro genebank.
Nibbles: GBIF, Maize Day, European biodiversity indicators, Fishy podcast, CABI website, Seed chipper, Indian biodiversity
- GBIF Science Symposium presentations online.
- Yes, I missed Mexico’s National Day of Maize too.
- Europe has some biodiversity indicators. And wants them streamlined. Some agriculture in there, if you look hard enough.
- WorldFish DG reflects.
- CABI wants help with its new website.
- Every breeder should have a seed chipper.
- India pushes seaweeds and spices. How about evergreen agriculture, though? I feel a COP coming on…
What I read on my summer holidays
Yeah, summer is over and I’m back at work. Maybe you noticed I haven’t contributed much here in the past month or so. Or maybe you didn’t. Jeremy kept up a steady stream of agrobiodiversity nuggets pretty much all through August. But my lack of activity on the blog doesn’t mean I haven’t tried to keep up, as you would know if you followed us on Facebook, Twitter or Scoop.it. Anyway, for those that don’t, and would like to catch up on my summer reading, here is, in nibble form, what caught my eye during the past month or so:
- “The potato is a religious commodity in America.” Explaining the governance crisis in the US using the humble spud.
- Wait a minute though: “The sizzle seems to be gone from America’s long-term relationship with the potato.” Which apparently means it needs an extreme makeover, colour-wise. For which you’ll need a genebank.
- A tree’s leaves can be genetically different from its roots. Does that mean we have to re-think all molecular phylogenies?
- And speaking of a tree’s leaves, these ones are a thousand years old and give you a buzz.
- A toff with a passion for pigs. P.G. Wodehouse had something to say about this, didn’t he?
- Turns out WFP has a podcast. And ICIMOD has an RSS feed.
- A mathematician factchecks Michael Pollan.
- Pear with me please, while I tell you about another USDA fruit collection.
- 15 Africa-changing innovations include orange-fleshed sweet potatoes. As if they weren’t there before. Anyway, they were THE story for a couple of weeks in August.
- 12 food security innovations include increasing crop diversity. With orange-fleshed sweet potatoes?
- How to put that banana genome to some use.
- Getting the most out of your enumerators.
- IUCN’s Conservation Campus. Any ag? And on a similar topic, training materials in anthropology.
- Automating conservation assessment of plants. You’ll need provenance data from herbaria such as this one at CIP, of course. Oh, and speaking of CIP, they need a phylogeneticist.
- A market opportunity for the mother-in-law?
- Measuring the health of the oceans. Hey, but it’s not all bad for fish.
- Ten species which rely on ex situ conservation. And why that number will go up. How to pay for it all, though?
- Book on the recent history of agricultural research reviewed. I wonder if they looked at the private sector. Because it seems there may be a case to answer.
- Another big grant for taxonomic databases. Ah but this is all going to be community-driven.
- Looks like this Australian genebank could have done with a decent database, community-driven or not.