- Genetic diversity of Brassica oleracea var. capitata gene bank accessions assessed by AFLP. Czech genebank; subgroups reflected place of origin.
- Optimizing the cropping mix in North Darfur State, Sudan. A study of Umkdada district. “…the results of the model were different from the real practices of the farmers.” Oh dear. To improve the fit, schoolboys should work in the fields more. And crops should fetch more. The dismal science indeed.
- Climate-driven simulation of global crop sowing dates. Ok, this model works. You can predict sowing dates under rainfed conditions for various annual crops from climatic conditions. Not entirely sure why you would want to, though.
- Exploring some of the myths of land use change: Can rural to urban migration drive declines in biodiversity? Yes, counter-intuitively, at least in the forests of Mexico’s southwestern highlands. More from Conservation Magazine.
- Pollination services in the UK: How important are honeybees? Quite a bit, but maybe not as much as previously thought. It’s the wild bees, stupid!
- Genetic diversity and symbiotic effectiveness of rhizobia isolated from root nodules of Phaseolus vulgaris L. grown in soils of Iran. It is high, and it varies, respectively.
- Interspecific hybridization of fig (Ficus carica L.) and Ficus erecta Thunb., a source of Ceratocystis canker resistance. It’s a breakthrough!
- Exploring the diversity of urban and peri-urban agricultural systems in Sudano-Sahelian West Africa: An attempt towards a regional typology. There are 6 types. Not 5; not 7. On this one, the journey is more interesting than the destination.
- Variability of wild olives (Olea europaea subsp. europaea var. sylvestris) analyzed by agro-morphological traits and SSR markers. There’s a lot of variabzzzzzzzzzz…
- Hemp in ancient rope and fabric from the Christmas Cave in Israel: Talmudic background and DNA sequence identification. Mainly flax, but some hemp, from both Roman and Chalcolithic periods. But can you smoke it?
- Modelling the distribution of domestic ducks in Monsoon Asia. Low resolution data, plus fancy modelling, can be used to get pretty good high resolution predictions.
- Gene flow between wheat and wild relatives: empirical evidence from Aegilops geniculata, Ae. neglecta and Ae. triuncialis. It happens, a lot.
- Toward food system sustainability through school food system change: Think&EatGreen@School and the making of a community-university research alliance. Food citizenship?
- Simulation of winter wheat yield and its variability in different climates of Europe: A comparison of eight crop growth models. Big differences among models, so best thing to do is to use the mean of all of them.
- The potential of plant viruses to promote genotypic diversity via genotype × environment interactions. The negative effect of White Clover Mosaic Virus (WCMV) infection on performance differs from white clover genotype to genotypes, which means differential selection, which means negative frequency-dependent selection in host populations, which means diversity. Via.
- Amplifying the benefits of agroecology by using the right cultivars. Why should we summarize, when an author has already done so?
Bill Gates on the BBC on agriculture
Bill Gates had a short Q&A with a BBC interviewer and a couple of African farmers on the World Service’s The World Today this morning. You can of course listen to him on iPlayer, but only for the next week or so. His bit starts at about the 13:30 mark and lasts about 10 minutes. But you can also listen to him here on our blog, where you don’t have to fiddle with the cursor and we promise not to take him down. Mr Gates does a pretty good job of sidestepping a question on slash-and-burn, and dealing head-on with one on GMOs. The project on breeding stress-tolerant rice he mentions is one the Foundation has with IRRI. But would it have killed him to mention that all breeding is underpinned by genebanks?
More pain
Don’t get frustrated, there is always hope! We have now included the possibility of directly downloading the map of the recommended locations for genetic reserves in kmz, shp and tiff formats in the main webpage. This website is focused on the dissemination of information to the general public. For those interested in more detail, the webpage of each proposed site provided links to protectedplanet.net or Natura 2000 viewer where additional information concerning the protected area can be gathered including the download of the corresponding kmz file. Anyhow, the downloadable files at the main page should facilitate the job from now on.
Many thanks to Jose Iriondo for this comment on my recent post on the pleasure and pain of combining biodiversity data. It’s not quite as easy as he makes out. Yes, you can download the boundaries of protected areas from the sites he mentions. This is what I got for the Estrecho site in southern Spain.
The white rectangle is all I could manage to extract from ProtectedPlanet, having gone through the pain of registering, though admittedly I’ve had better luck in the past. It could be something I’m doing wrong. The green shape I got from Natura 2000 and obviously it’s considerably better. But it still does not have the Avena, Beta, Brassica and Prunus species data in the original website AEGRO website. For that, however, it sounds like we wont have to wait for long. Jose again:
Futhermore, we will soon include the possibility of directly downloading the kmz file corresponding to each of the Google Earth plugins of each proposed site.
Hope does spring eternal.
Science prize opens for nominations
Three Quarks Daily, one of the must-read science-blog aggregator and filter thingies, has announced its 3rd Annual 3QD Science Prize. There are some great entires — you nominate a blog post by adding its URI to the comments at that post — but none that I noticed dealing with agriculture or food. To pick one of our own posts is far too difficult, but maybe you would like to do it for us?
You have until Tuesday 31 May, and we’d be dead pleased.
Meanwhile, I’m off to nominate someone else.
The pleasures and frustrations of combining biodiversity data
This website provides information on recommended locations, mainly in protected areas, suited for the establishment of genetic reserves for Avena, Beta, Brassica and Prunus targeted crop wild relative taxa across Europe, in the context of the AEGRO project. Available information includes ecogeographical data as well as an inventory of crop wild relatives belonging to the four target genera occurring at each location.
This is the map of the recommended sites:
Which is great, and even greater is the fact that you can look at individual species, and the suggested protected areas, using a nifty Google Maps plugin. This, for example, is the Estrecho site in southern Spain, which is where you find an endemic wild oat (among other things).
The problem is 1 that I can find no way of mashing these data up with anything else. For example, say you want to add Genesys data to see if any other species occur in this, or any other, protected area. I don’t see how. You know where those Genesys accessions are:
But there’s no way to combine the two. Or maybe you want to see if the area was affected by fires last summer. Can’t be done. You know where the fires occurred:
But there’s no way to combine the two. Whereas of course you can easily combine that NASA fire data with the Genesys data, simply by bringing both into Google Earth. 2
So I guess my plea is: if you’re going to use Google Maps or Google Earth to display your biodiversity data, please also make it downloadable. Maybe there was a reason why this couldn’t be done in this project. I’m all ears.
Oh, and there’s another thing while I’m indulging my hobbyhorses. Can’t we use some innovative approaches to add to these kinds of datasets? I mean, if it can be done for amphibians…