Couldn’t resist posting this photo of a truly weird sheep.
That elusive nutritional impact
Maybe it’s all the nutrition stuff going on here and at Vaviblog lately, but when I finally tried to catch up with a couple of papers from the recent special issue of the International Journal of Agricultural Sustainability on “Sustainable intensification: increasing productivity in African food and agricultural systems,” one thing struck above all else. And that was that both in the case of orange-fleshed sweet potatoes in Uganda and indigenous African vegetables in East Africa, there is still no evidence of a nutritional or health impact of adoption of that particular agrobiodiversity.
Ex ante predictions, sure. Economic impacts, plenty. Even in some cases nutritional impact of the same intervention (those orange sweet potatoes) in another place (South Africa). Maybe the impact on health and nutrition is there and just hasn’t been measured, or it has been measured but hasn’t been published yet. Or maybe it’s just too early for such an impact to have manifested itself. But when it comes to the specific agrobiodiversity cases of sweet potatoes in Uganda and traditional greens in East Africa, it seems to me that the biggest documented impact of so far has been on income.
Will someone out there set me straight? Please!
Oh, and since I’m at it, there’s a paper out by an old friend from the Pacific on a quick method of measuring some nutritional variables in sweet potatoes.
The morality of data trawling
Is it morally questionable for a genebank to trawl the internet for information from other researchers about its accessions? Ruaraidh thinks maybe, Robert that it would be morally questionable not to do so. Read the full exchange in the comments to our recent post about germplasm documentation being a two-way street. What do you think?
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:
- The functional role of producer diversity in ecosystems.
- Does plant diversity benefit agroecosystems? A synthetic review.
- Why intraspecific trait variation matters in community ecology.
- Genotypic richness and dissimilarity opposingly affect 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?
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.