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Diversity everywhere

We cannot be the only ones to have noticed that in the past couple of weeks there has been a spate of papers on different aspects of the link between plant diversity and ecosystem functioning:

Needless to say, we’re working our way through that little lot, so you wont have to. More soon. Unless, that is, someone out there wants to do the honours?

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Mapping drought risk

Just a quick follow-up to the rhyming couplet on water-related stresses in the just-published Brainfood. The Center for Hazards and Risks Research (CHRR) at Columbia University, which we have mentioned here before in connection with tsunami risk, also has data on Global Drought Hazard Distribution.

With a little R-related effort by Robert 1 you can get a Google Earth file, which looks like this for Asia. 2 I’ve also added MODIS fire hotspots for the past 24 hours, merely because I can. That would be the little fire icons.

And that means you can mash up drought risk with germplasm origin (from Genesys, say), in this case from Chad as an example.

Which is a great thing to be able to do because as we have just had reconfirmed by our friend Dag Endresen, the origin of germplasm allows you to make some predictions about its performance.

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Brainfood: Chia, Lentils, Bambara groundnut, Cacao, Amaranths, Rwanda, Cherimoya, Conservation, Drought, Plasticity, Phenology

And here are a trio of rhyming couplets, if you see what I mean:

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Nutritionist tells researchers what to eat shock

According to a report over at the Vaviblog, Bioversity’s nutritionist Jessica Fanzo was beset by questioners after her talk at the Vavilov Institute mentioned both the bad nutritional status of most Russians and the high nutritional value of some fruits and berries at the threatened Pavlovsk Experiment Station. She was bombarded with requests for advice. The Vaviblog’s correspondent reports:

One response stuck in my mind. Jessica was asked whether one couldn’t get all the vitamins and minerals one needs from pills. She said yes, but you have to get everything else from food, so why not the vitamins as well, by choosing your food better?

Especially if you like your potatoes processed and potable.

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How much spending goes on food?

There’s an interactive map at Civil Eats, which is great as far as it goes. But does it go far enough? Almost all of Africa is a vast gray expanse of “no data”. Where’s the companion map that shows what percent of a person’s diet they grow themselves?

There’s also an interesting statement in the comments: “Life expectancy is higher in some nations that spend above 10% on foods.” Mash-up artists, Gapminder mavens, what are you waiting for?