Policy

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.

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.

Bunch of presentations from ICRAF’s #BeatingFamine shindig in Nairobi online.
Humungous fungus threat.
Fertilizers good for yields. Say what?
A study on land restoration in Burkina Faso. Just in time.
Speaking of restoration, chocolate can restore tropical forests. Universal panacea, obviously.
Farming First welcomes the World Bank’s guide to investing in agricultural innovation systems. Buy low, sell high?
A Cisgenic Approach for Improving the Bioavailability of Phosphate in the Barley Grain. That’ll please the folks who are scared of transgenics.
I’ve missed out on the whole Hunger Games thing, but I have grown Katniss. I called it wapato.
Israel’s Ministry of Agriculture creates a Department of Ecoagriculture. Sign of the times?
New dossier from Spore, on sustainable intensification. No time to digest it yet.

GBIF makes its move.
Homaging the seed.
Learning sustainability from old Amazonian farmers. Really old. Really, really old.
Yet another Aussie genebank. Or maybe the same one, I’ve lost track. And interest.
Where climate data comes from.
Maine’s fiber community, what, exposed? Unveiled? Uncovered? And similar from Bolivia.
REDD+ will save us all.
Don’t crack open the mead to celebrate the solution to colony collapse disorder just yet.
All things Capsicum on one handy website.
Whole bunch of policy briefs on African seed systems. Don’t know if I’ll ever have the time to read through the lot, but cursory perusal suggests the following bottom line: the market can’t do it all by itself.