- Pepe gets a prize from a queen.
- The Princess of the Pea gives no prizes, though.
- Oldest farming village in a Mediterranean island found on Cyprus. No royalty, alas.
- The Emperor of Agricultural Statistical Handbooks is out. Oh, and the online source of the raw data has just got some new clothes.
- Fish are in trouble. Well, not all. Kingfish, queenfish, king mackerel and emperor angelfish all unavailable for comment.
- No royalty connected with these beautiful pictures of Asian fish either. Does a former Dutch consul count?
- Quite a crown on this wild goat.
- The Royal (geddit?) Botanic Gardens Kew’s Breathing Planet Campaign: The Video.
- ICIMOD on the role bees (including, presumably, their queens) in mountain agriculture.
Nibbles: Weeds, Cardamoms, Bananas
- High-level summit on weed management does little to inspire confidence (in me).
- Careful with that cardamom! Forests may suffer.
- A crop wild relative – with photo! – among “ten extremely rare seeds”. I think they mean “extremely rare species”.
Nibbles: Yams, Aroids, Shattering gene, Panicoid genomes
- Improving yams at IITA.
- Improving aroids the world over.
- Parallel evolution in the domestication of cereals. Will it help to improve them?
- Foxtail millet helps with switchgrass genome assembly. And, one supposes, improvement.
Brainfood: Bee diversity, Fodder innovation, African agrobiodiversity, Quinoa economy, Fragmentation and diversity, Rice in Madagascar, Rice in Thailand
- Management increases genetic diversity of honey bees via admixture. No domestication bottleneck there!
- Enhancing innovation in livestock value chains through networks: Lessons from fodder innovation case studies in developing countries. Fodder innovators of the world, organize. If you don’t, you will lose your value chains.
- Introduction to special issue on agricultural biodiversity, ecosystems and environment linkages in Africa. Special issues? What special issue?
- The construction of an alternative quinoa economy: balancing solidarity, household needs, and profit in San Agustín, Bolivia. Despite the allure of fancy denominations of origin and the like, old-fashioned cooperatives, and the much-maligned intermediary, manage to hang on in there.
- Species–genetic diversity correlations in habitat fragmentation can be biased by small sample sizes. Can.
- The original features of rice (Oryza sativa L.) genetic diversity and the importance of within-variety diversity in the highlands of Madagascar build a strong case for in situ conservation. Actually the way I read it, the stronger case is for ex situ. But see what you think.
- Population structure of the primary gene pool of Oryza sativa in Thailand. In situ Strikes Back.
Mapping some life
Yes, indeed Map of Life is indeed live, as we Nibbled yesterday, at least for amphibians, birds, reptiles, mammals and fish. ((Coincidentally, there were also two pieces on the tubes yesterday about the threats to fish that it occurred to me might benefit from the kind of aggregation of data that MoL does. But anyway.)) MoL pulls in point data from GBIF, of course, but also polygon distribution maps from IUCN, user-uploaded maps, local inventories from various sources and the regional checklists from WWF. That’s a whole load of different sources, formats and types of data to be served up in one googly visualization. Quite impressive. Which does make one wonder why one is reduced to screengrabs to share the results, as for example below for the yak and Dall’s Sheep, two of the high altitude mammals we featured a few days back. No doubt they’ll sort that out.
And we of course also look forward to the inclusion of plants, and in particular crop wild relatives, in the near future. We can point them to some data sources for those…