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Mapping out your garden

There’s a website called Plants Map which lets you manage and share information about the precise location and characteristics of the plants you grow, including photos, and even print out nice labels, complete with QR codes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmonl8lszIw

The target audience seems to be gardens (including botanical gardens), nurseries, and the like. But it could be field genebanks, couldn’t it? Or even seed banks, with a little tweaking, and location on the shelf taking the place of latitude and longitude. Something for Genesys to learn from?

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CWR front and centre

Screen Shot 2016-05-11 at 8.59.14 AMTo coincide with the State of the World’s Plants Symposium, which starts today, Kew have just dropped a monumental report of the same name, complete with fancy website. Nice to see crop wild relatives get a decent amount of space (p. 21) in the section on useful plants. Oh, and the report and symposium come along with some good funding news for Kew.

Speaking of funding for crop wild relatives:

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and Toyota Motor Corporation (Toyota) today announced a five-year partnership to provide funding to broaden the scope of The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. This will significantly increase knowledge on the extinction risk of more than 28,000 species, including many that are key food sources for a significant portion of the global population.
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IUCN experts have chosen to focus much of the newly funded research on the populations of plants and fish that billions of people depend on as a vital source of food. These will include species of wild rice and wheat that are crucial to food security because they are the source of genetic material used to increase the yield, fertility and resistance to disease of staple crops produced by farmers across the world.

Don’t see any of this happening even a few years back. Do you?

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Request for pulse nutritional data

As part of the International Year of Pulses, we are working on a global database on the composition of pulses, starting with the collection of analytical data. We have found many scientific articles on pulses, which we are compiling. As usual, most data are on proximates, minerals and amino acids. If you have any unpublished data on the composition of pulses or their products, we would be extremely happy to include them into our database, especially if they contain vitamins, but we would be interested in any compositional data, or if they are on processing influence, fermentation, soaking etc.

If you have any analytical compositional data to share please send the sources or the compiled data to Fernanda Grande, (Fernanda[dot]Grande[at]fao[dot]org) who is coordinating this project.

That’s from Ruth Charrondiere, INFOODS coordinator at FAO. There’s more information on the IYP website. Seems like a worthwhile endeavour, please give (data) generously. Oh, and if you want to meet Ruth and her colleagues, and learn more about food composition tables in general, check this out.

LATER: Wondering what to do with all that data? Here’s a thought…

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Brainfood: Old chestnuts, Seed networks, Seed health, Soybean GWAS, Quinoa ABS, Taro breeding

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Featured: Erna Bennett

Darrell Rankin reminisces about Erna Bennett:

She told me about flying unarmed bombers from the U.S. to Britain, how her facility with languages led to her recruitment to the intelligence services, how she was parachuted into Greece, about her capture and liberation from Gestapo custody, how the British took Greece over after the war (the bullet holes are still visible) and about her career in the FAO.

And that’s not the half of it…