- Meta-analysis or no meta-analysis, breeders still want to breed for organic conditions.
- Farm Radio does tree farming.
- A plea for metallophytes. Every damn plant group has a lobby these days. I bet some of them are crop wild relatives though.
- As does almost every style of food preparation. Although I have to say I myself can never read enough about fermentation.
- This video is advertised as being about food preservation, and I was going to link it to the above, but it turns out to be about seed storage. Which is interesting enough, and important too, but not the same thing. A clever video, which I personally think doesn’t in the end make its point.
Taro help is at hand
It was a couple of years ago that we started talking about the arrival of taro leaf blight in West Africa, and the possible role that resistant material from the Pacific might have in averting a catastrophe. Well:
On 21 August 2012, help came with the arrival of breeders’ lines from Samoa and PNG and varieties from countries in Asia.
We will be following their progress with much interest.
A couple of CWRs on the brink
The Top 100 Threatened Species list just released by IUCN, including in a nifty online booklet with nice photos, includes two crop wild relatives: Dioscorea strydomiana from South Africa and Lathyrus belinensis from Turkey. The yam is down to 250 plants and is threatened by harvesting, the vetch down to 1,000, with building work encroaching the population. But in both cases, there is seed conserved ex situ. Surely there are some CWRs that are more threatened than that? Maybe even some wild tomatoes.
Nibbles: Red List, Açaí, Edible forest, Horticulture, Heirloom seed bank, Malnutrition journal, Tea breeding, Speak!
- Can cultivated species get their own Red List? Stefano Padulosi asks the tough questions.
- Açaí: could the wonder fruit also be wonderful for forests? CIFOR asks the tough questions.
- And more: You mean you can eat that?
- Horticulture has rock stars? My turn to ask the tough questions.
- Ok, so what US county is “…a hotbed of diversified, small-scale organic, natural processed food production”? Maybe not so tough.
- Will there be a follow-up to Lancet’s 2008 series on malnutrition? That’s an easy one.
- Luigi’s mother-in-law asks: Where can I get my hands on that drought-resistant tea?
- Got any other questions? World Wide Views on Biodiversity wants to hear from you, this Saturday. (Answers too, I suppose.)
IUCN and Microsoft map threats to biodiversity
“We’re building an application that allows people to map those threats spatially,” Joppa explains. “We’re trying to provide a repository of evidence for threats to species.”
Lucas Joppa is talking about a collaboration between Microsoft and IUCN to map threats to biodiversity. Worth keeping an eye on. But I wonder if they’ll consider agrobiodiversity too. If so, we have some ideas here at the blog. Anyway, presumably the thing will link up with GeoCAT in some clever way.
LATER: And also link to this? Or at least suck in the data?