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Mapping

As Luigi pointed out, we have a new facility here: mapping. Our idea is to add more value to the posts, by making it easy to see where on Earth they relate to. And by the same token, you can click on the Map page and see all the geo-referenced posts. 1

We won’t be tagging the little Nibbles, and we aren’t too sure how we are going to cope with single stories that refer to lots of places. Maybe tag just one, maybe think of something else. But for now we think this is, as the young people say, wicked cool, and we hope you find it useful.

As to how I did it, I didn’t have to do very much. The blogging software we use, WordPress, has brilliant people writing plug-ins that add all sorts of functionality. All I did was add one of those — GeoMashup by Dylan Kuhn — and then figure out how to get it to display here. There’s a lot more we could do to improve the map page … and maybe we will.

Meanwhile, I cannot for the life of me figure out why the Map link from Luigi’s post on those long-crowing chickens goes to the right place, but does not show a pin. Most mysterious. some of the others aren’t showing pins either. I need to investigate. So I investigated, and it seems there’s nothing wrong after all. Must be some kind of browser cache voodoo. Enough.

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Tree farmers addicted to monoculture

Six months ago a storm knocked down more than 40 million trees in Germany. Most of them were spruce in huge monocultures. Environmentally savvy foresters, according to a report in Der Spiegel, had warned that large spruce plantations were a disaster waiting to happen. So, given an opportunity to replant after the storm and make use of natural tree diversity, including broadleaves, what are most tree farmers doing? Planting pure spruce again. And they are doing so with the help of large state subsidies.

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New efforts to domesticate grasses down under

The Australian Research Council has awarded A$ 1 million to Professor Robert Henry of Southern Cross University to examine about 1000 native grass species as potential replacements for wheat, rice and maize. The grant is framed as a response to global warming, but it is pretty interesting under any circumstances. Henry, Director of Southern Cross University’s Centre for Plant Conservation Genetics, told the Australian Associated Press that

the project targets the accelerated domestication of native species which have lower tillage and fertiliser requirements and increased salt, shade, frost and or drought tolerances than the current introduced cereal and fodder crops.

Of course, those grasses have been around since the first farmers landed in Australia, but they never tried to do anything with them. Because they couldn’t?

There is a great opportunity to use the new techniques of modern biology to accelerate the domestication of some of the more promising Australian native species.

Preliminary results are expected within three years, and seeds will be made available through a partnership with Native Seeds Pty Ltd. We shall see.

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Long-crowing chicken origins

You may have noticed a neat new feature on the blog. There’s a “Show on map” link after some of the latest postings which whisks you off to a pointer to the geographic location of the story. Jeremy will say a bit more about how he did it and why later on. I bring it up now because it was the reason why I stumbled on an interesting paper.

You remember that video of the long-crowing chicken from a few days back? Well, how do you geo-tag that? Where does the weird creature come from? The caption on MySapceTV says that it is a pure-bred Totenko cockerel. If you google that, one of the things you get pointed to is a DNA study that suggests that this and a couple of other long-crowers were bred on Okinawa from fighting cocks from southern China or Indochina. Want to see exactly where Okinawa is? Click below…

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Nigerian President has rice initiative

I found a story in today’s Vanguard, a Nigerian news site, that could serve as a case study to illustrate the complexities of the interaction between conservation and use of plant genetic resources. Government imposes levy on rice imports, and launches a Presidential Initiative, no less, on Rice Production, Processing and Export. High-yielding varieties — including the famous NERICA — are multiplied and made available to farmers. A “rice value chain” linking farmers, parboilers, millers, traders etc. is facilitated. A project called Promoting Pro-Poor Opportunities in Commodity and Service Markets (PropCom) is launched, funded by Britain’s DFID, “a market-driven intervention programme that facilitates initiatives which enable the production of quality local rice in sufficient quantities that can compete with imported rice and benefit the poor stakeholders.”

I have two questions for the students who will no doubt be given this case study to ponder in years to come. Is all this good or bad for rice genetic diversity? And will it be good or bad for rice farmers in the long run?