- Jacob alerts me that our “throw duplicates of all accessions from an airplane flying across Africa” Gedanken experiment may be closer to realization than we thought.
- Reindeer in trouble. In other news, there are 7 subspecies of the things.
- Indonesia looks to its threatened livestock wild relatives.
- Agriculture (among other things) in North Korea.
- Buffalo distributed in Myanmar. From where?
- Local vegetables promoted in the Philippines.
- More inspirational stuff on the Millennium Seed Bank from Jonathan Drori.
- Organizations Involved in Organic Plant Breeding Projects and Education. Not as many as you’d think.
- “Learning centres” helping farmers identify challenges, adapt to climate change.
DIVERSEEDS puts out DVD
DIVERSEEDS is a scientific project supported fully by the European Commission´s 6th framework programme. We are “Networking on conservation and use of plant genetic resources in Europe and Asia.”
And I think we may have mentioned them before. Anyway, the latest news from the network is that they have a DVD out:
This documentary shows why biodiversity is important for agriculture and how it is conserved and used in many different locations in Europe and Asia.
The DVD costs about US$40, but you can get a discount if you order five or more. I haven’t seen it, so I can’t tell you much more about it. But the contents seems to consist of a series of fifteen or so short (average 3 minutes) films on a wide variety of agrobiodiversity conservation and use initiatives, ranging from the Austrian NGO Arche Noah, to the Thai genebank, to crop wild relatives in the Fertile Crescent, to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. I’ll try to get hold of a copy and report.
Test your domestication knowledge
Kris’s Archaeology Blog at About.com:Archaeology has a challenging quiz about domestication. I got 15/20. You?
Happy Birthday, Prof. Karl Hammer
And sorry for missing it when it actually came, back in February!
He fundamentally contributed to our present knowledge of cultivated plants’ biodiversity in Cuba, Eastern Europe, Italy, Libya, Oman and Korea. As an enthusiastic researcher heading the Gatersleben Genebank and later heading the Agrobiodiversity Department of Kassel University in Witzenhausen, his scientific work covered a tremendously wide field of research in plant genetic resources, ranging from pollination ecology and taxonomy (e.g. of Aegilops, Agrostemma, Brassica, Datura, Secale, Triticum) to questions of plant domestication, genetic erosion and evaluation, maintenance and utilization of the entire spectrum of plant genetic resources, including underutilized and neglected crops.
Many happy returns! Enjoy your retirement!
Nibbles: Guerrilla gardening, Kuwait genebank, Satoyama, Salt and wheat
- From guerrilla gardens to guerrilla flowerboxes.
- “Kuwait needs to have a national genetic bank for plants and seeds by using the help of international experts…”
- Restoration of Satoyama and wetlands by local citizens in Japan.
- Lots of variation in salt tolerance among Georgian wild wheats.