- How to breed a better brassica.
- Kenya encourages farmers to switch from tobacco to food.
- The King is dead … Long live the King.
- A very long post about Challenges to Genetic Diversity and Implications For Food Security in South Asia.
- Plumpy’nut set free, more or less.
- Dirt, the movie — I’d like to see that.
- Real popcorn, Yaqui style.
- Quínoa andina podría cultivarse en desiertos del mundo. Don’t they have their own orphan crops?
- Red List assessment of nine Aegilops species in Armenia. New wheat wild relatives paper.
Earth Engine and crop wild relatives
The other recent Google Earth innovation is Earth Engine, where you can check out a bunch of interesting visualizations of environmental data. Spurred by something Julian said, I downloaded the MODIS VCF global tree cover change dataset (2000-2005). And then I went to Genesys and downloaded data on wild beans (Phaseolus spp). It was not very difficult to put the two together in Google Earth. In the map below, which just looks at central Mexico, orange means high deforestation, and green afforestation. Is it me, or do germplasm accession seem to be concentrated in areas of high deforestation? Anyway, with a little work, this could be a cheap and cheerful way to identify particularly threatened areas for germplasm collecting.
Who wants to be the first to put crop wild relatives data in Earth Engine?
The revival of taro biodiversity in Hawaii, in film
This just in from a reader in Hawaii. Thanks, Penny.
The film short “Na Ono o Ka Aina; Delicacies of the Land” featuring Jerry Konanui, a Hawaiian, expert in the identification of traditional Hawaiian taro cultivars, and an inspiration in their recovery. This film is the work of award winning Hawaii-based filmmakers, Na Maka o Ka Aina. The film garnered awards at the Aotearoa (New Zealand) and Hawaii film festivals in 2009 and 2010, and the short was featured on National Geographic’s “All Roads Film Festival” in 2008. One way to protect local crop biodiversity — reinspire everyone — from farmers to researchers to students; especially within the community that once created that diversity. It’s in the numbers; the more old cultivars we recover and grow and the more who grow, the less risk of loss we will have. You can get a taste of the film short — and the ono (delicious) taros of Hawaii below.
3D trees in Google Earth
The latest version of Google Earth has 3D trees! Just a few cities’ parks, a couple of wild sites (rainforest, mangroves…) and a reforestation project for now, but surely more to come.
I look forward to seeing the world’s great field genebanks in 3D in due course, such as the coconut genebank in Ivory Coast or the Breadfruit Institute’s collection in Hawaii. And maybe eventually even smaller ones, such as this fruit collection I visited last week in Tajikistan.
But maybe we could start with Pavlovsk?
Nibbles: FAO newsletters, Spanish fowl, Jamaican cattle, Food composition database
- New Plant Breeding News and Non-Wood Forest Products.
- Nice pix of Spanish chicks.
- Jamaican cattle in trouble, man.
- FAO/INFOODS Food Composition Database on Biodiversity will be published on 15 December 2010. Put out more flags.