- Mead, part 4. You can find 1-3 yourselves.
- Plant genetic resources key to food security. The Jakarta Post gets it.
- Long, complex post from ILRI on zoonoses; diseases that infect people and animals.
- What are all the flowers for? The Provincial Agricultural Chamber of East Flanders seeks answers. h/t PAR.
- Wanna do a post-doc on Comprehensive modelling of agro-biodiversity in relation to seed exchange networks?
- Sacred groves threatened, by Times of India.
- Fabulous botanical posters, many featuring useful species, and all useful information. Of course tomatoes are fruits.
- I meant to write in detail about how Untapped crop data from Africa predicts corn peril if temperatures rise, but you know, life intervened.
Genebanks under threat all over
More bad news for the Egyptian Deserts Genebank. El-Sayed Mohamed El-Azazi tells us of a fire on Thursday 10 March, mainly affecting the glasshouses, by the look of it. The cause is unknown, but El-Sayed does say there is no security at all on the premises still. Coincidentally, there was a piece on El Masry Al Youm (Egypt Today, I believe) on the quite separate National Gene Bank of Egypt the very next day, painting a somewhat surreal, under the circumstances, picture of tranquility and business-as-usual.
As for the situation in Japan, still no news of any damage to genebanks there. The recently published Google Earth plugin modeling the height of the tsunami is incredibly scary. Black is >250cm, even orange is 50cm.
Genebanks and tsunamis
And, of course, it turns out you can indeed map tsunami risk, or at least where tsunamis have caused most damage in the past. Just download the Natural Hazards KMZ file from NOAA. This is what it has to say about Japan. The little yellow houses are genebanks. The squares are tsunamis since 1900, colour-coded for the number of casualties they caused.
Genebanks and earthquakes
As we watch the devastation wrought by the earthquake in Japan, and mourn the loss of life, we should also reflect on the possible danger to genebanks. The US Geological Survey have a real-time earthquake Google Earth plug-in, and you can download a lot of genebank locations from WIEWS. Mash the two together and zoom in on Japan and you get this.
Fortunately, we’re not getting any indications of damage to Japanese genebanks (the red squares), so far. Something similar could probably be done with threat from tsunamis.
Nibbles: UG99, Synsepalum dulciforum
- Slim pickings 1: “Rust never sleeps.”
- Slim pickings 2: silly idea for solving world hunger.