Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
A very attractive map of the races of Maize found in Peru posted on Facebook sent me scurrying for the source. Turns out it was put out by the Ministry of the Environment last year. Here it is:
Much prettier than another version that one can also find online:
Of course, these types of maps underplay the diversity that you can find in any one locality within Peru, which can also be considerable. Nice to look at nonetheless.
Antonia continues a metaphor, and asks for opinions on GCP’s RSS feeds.
It’s a new website, so still lots of construction debris flying and lying about, and gaping holes here and there, but we’re working on it as we go along… Will be interesting to hear the views of others on RSS.
Let her have it here.
More cartographic busy-ness from IFPRI. They’re mapping cropland, and need your help to validate the results. That’s because the available maps sometimes disagree. And I’m not even entirely sure they’ve looked at all the maps that are out there. What about IWMI‘s stuff? Or FAO‘s? Or even ESRI’s pretty, but pretty useless, recent offering? I expect most of these use the same raw data anyway. So it’s probably a good idea to try to sort it all out with a bit of crowd-sourced ground-truthing. But I do wonder whether those citizen scientists are looking at extra things, beyond just verifying whether they’re standing in cropland or forest. Like gender, for example. Other bits of IFPRI would probably find that interesting, and would even be able to tell them how to do it.
CGIAR’s Generation Challenge Programme is mounting a reasonably effective information blitzkrieg, and chickpeas are the shock troops, with blog posts and videos their weapons of choice. A minor triumph is in the offing on the social networking front. But I have to say I think the RSS feeds are a bit of a rout. The main site has way too many. Yet the blogs over at GCP’s main online product, the otherwise quite impressive Integrated Breeding Platform, don’t have any at all, though the discussion forums (and what exactly is the difference?) do. Time to re-think the whole RSS strategy.