Posts

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Stable identifiers for genebank accessions still a dream?

Natural history collections and herbaria contain many millions of specimens that are used for research. When scientists publish their results they cite which specimens they used so that other scientists can both check the work and build on what has been achieved.

Institutions that hold specimens are publishing increasing amounts of data about (and images of) their specimens on-line. We need to have a way for scientists to reference specimens so that someone reading research results can simply click a link to see the supporting data and perhaps an image. To make this happen we need stable web links to the specimens that the holding institutions commit to maintain for the long term and that are implemented in a similar way across many institutions. Once this mechanism is widely adopted machines will be able to exploit the links to specimens to help do entirely new kinds of research.

This meeting was about establishing a consistent mechanism that will work across institutions.

Yes! And genebank accessions? When can we have some movement on that?

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Brainfood: Maize rhizosphere, Climate change vulnerability, Heterosis squared, African forests, Sequencing genebanks

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The state of chickens

Luigi pointed me to a nice graphic poster of the officially approved bird for all 50 of the United States. Among them, I noticed two chickens, for Delaware and Rhode Island. Rhode Island might seem obvious enough, the Rhode Island Red being almost the canonical farmyard bird.

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But Delaware, not so much.

In fact Delaware was one of the biggest poultry and egg producing states in the Union. Sussex County DE, where the modern broiler industry began, still holds the record for egg and poultry sales, “with $707 million, or 1.9 percent of the total U.S. value” in 2007. That’s almost 2% of the value from 0.024% of the land. But Delaware’s state bird – the Blue Hen Chicken – is not one of the squillions (many of them carrying Rhode Island Red genes, I’ll warrant) that contribute to Sussex County’s top cock status. It isn’t even a real breed. 1

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Nope; apparently Delaware’s blue hen chicken is a reminder of the Revolutionary War. Exactly how remains uncertain. Cock-fighting was common there at the time, and the Delaware Regiment may or may not have carried feisty blue gamecocks into battle, may or may not have been as feisty as a blue gamecock, and may or may not have looked like a flock of feisty blue gamecocks in their natty uniforms. There is a flock of blue hen chickens at the University of Delaware, whose mascot is the blue hen chicken, but it was created in the 1960s by H.S. Hallock du Pont, and has not been recognized as a proper breed, perhaps because it does not, in fact, breed true. Yet.

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Atlas of Living Australia in the spotlight, again

Commenting on a comment on my slightly disappointed take on a couple of new spatial datasets yesterday, our regular reader Glenn Hyman, another CGIAR CGI uber-geek, muses thus:

If I was a young GIS geek, I think I would concentrate on how to create online applications for the non-expert.

Do you mean, Glenn, the kind of “online application for the non-expert” which the Atlas of Living Australia aspires, with considerable success, to be? Which coincidentally is being so actively discussed on Twitter just now. 2 And which I need to road test again very soon, as there have been significant changes since the last time I took it around the block.