Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
…Caroline [Chartrand] and about 100 other indigenous farmers and gardeners—along with students and community members—gathered in March on the White Earth reservation in Northern Minnesota to share knowledge, stories, and, of course, seeds.
Don’t know how we missed this from yes! magazine a couple of weeks back. In particular as one of the stories was about Pawnee corn, a topic we have covered here a number of times.
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?
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.
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.