Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
We’ve been asked to contribute an agricultural perspective to the Biodiversity Informatics Whitepaper, a document
…that is intended to inform funding organisations about the priorities as perceived by practitioners in the field.
You can find the document itself, and more background, here. Well worth a read, even if you decide not to comment.
…is off and running in Copenhagen
The Global Biodiversity Informatics Conference (GBIC) will convene expertise in the fields of biodiversity informatics, genomics, earth observation, natural history collections, biodiversity research and policy needed to set such collaboration in motion.
Follow it on Twitter. See the presentations.
allowing access to relevant environmental data and predict, anywhere on earth, on any res, at any time, as a service for anyone #gbic2012
— Donat Agosti (@myrmoteras) July 2, 2012
Report on it here, if you like.
LATER: Oh gosh, there’s also this today: 2nd LCIRAH Annual Workshop “The Role of Agricultural and Food Systems Research in Combating Chronic Disease for Development.” Here’s the hashtag.
Jawoo Koo has the lowdown on that decision to use the SPAM crop maps for the yield gap atlas rather than, as it turns out, MIRCA2000’s:
The workshop organizer distributed MIRCA’s crop distribution maps to each country expert and asked for feedback on whether the maps adequately represented where the crops are (or aren’t) in terms of harvested area. Reviewing all the feedback comments and comparing the results against the SPAM data, the organizers established that “… In nearly all cases, the SPAM maps were more consistent with the feedback we received from the GYGA agronomists at the workshop.”
There are caveats, though. Read the full story.
There’s an obituary of Erna Bennett by Peter Hanelt, Helmut Knüpffer and Karl Hammer of the Leibniz Institute of Plant Genetics and Crop Plant Research (IPK), Gatersleben, Germany in the latest Genetic Resources and Crop Evolution. It reveals a side of Erna that was new to me:
In Erna’s own words, her life was devoted to “science, politics and poetry”. The particular circumstances determined which of these aims dominated in a given life period, but always all of them interfered with each other. Her very successful role in science is obvious. With respect to her political activities, her major regret was that they did not bear more fruit (Jackson 2012). Her passion for poetry is possibly only known to smaller circles. Several of her own poems were successful in poetry contests. Knowledge of foreign languages (she spoke fluently English, Greek, Italian, could understand German and Spanish) facilitated her access to foreign literature and allowed her to understand it in its original form. Erna admired, among others, the poems of Pablo Neruda, and she transferred this special taste to some of us. Motives of her own verses, especially from the last years of her life, were severe disagreements with actual political developments. In her article “Translating Poetry” (Bennett 2002c), she reflected about poetry translations: “Where the music is dominant in the original work, as in the ancient sagas and epic poems, the translator rightly concentrates on the music.”
Contact Helmut Knüpffer for a reprint.