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More distributed fun

Our loyal reader will know I have a weakness for applications which harness the power of hordes of distributed internet users, especially if they involve mapping. There was the thing about digitizing herbarium sheets. And the thing about mapping photos of tomatoes. 1 And of course there’s the Degree Confluence Project, which I thought I had blogged about but can’t find in our archives, so perhaps I didn’t, but I should.

The latest such project to come to my attention is called ScenicOrNot. The website presents you with a photograph of a location in Britain and you give it marks out of 10 for scenic beauty. Eventually, I suppose, there will be a map of scenic hotspots — and, for that matter, coldspots — but the developers are cagey about exactly why they are doing this. All fun enough, and possibly even useful, though I’m struggling to think of the agrobiodiversity relevance.

The photographs used by ScenicOrNot come from Geograph, which is doing a similar thing to the Degree Confluence Project, but only for Britain rather than the whole world. The idea is to document with a photograph every 1x1km grid square in the country: “8,570 users have contributed 1,267,685 images covering 242,182 grid squares, or 73.0% of the total.” Exploring that incredible resource does turn up some things of agricultural biodiversity interest. Check out, for example, the oast houses of Britain. The Degree Confluence dataset has been used to ground-truth a Global Map of Rainfed Cropland Areas. Not sure if a similar fate awaits the much denser British dataset.

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Featured: Climate change

Meike sets out a research agenda:

[D]efinitely both climate change and land use changes will affect crop production areas and the distribution ranges of crop wild relatives. Most likely they will also influence gene flow and introgression rates, e.g. by affecting the niches of pollinators, flowering times etc.

She was talking about mapping studies, but we say there’s more than enough there for everybody.

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GMO bananas or nothing?

Simplicity rules, not only in the minds of many researchers and farmers, but also, and to an even greater extent, in the press. Shades of grey, subtleties of interpretation, multiple responses to complex questions; this is not the stuff of daily journalism. But why not? Is there any evidence that readers really can’t cope with this kind of complexity? Or maybe it is the journalists who can’t cope.

There’s no other way to explain the appearance, yet again, of a story saying that genetically engineered bananas are the best way to contain banana Xanthomonas wilt (BXW) in East Africa. According to the article, “genetic modification offers a low-cost and timely solution to the farmers who are reluctant to use labor-intensive control measures”. Those labour-intensive methods?

A task force set up by the Ugandan government in 2001 in response to the outbreak of the disease reduced the disease incidence to less than 10% in areas where farmers adopted these measures. However, the implementation is not sustainable due to the high costs.

But I can’t see any reference to studies of those costs, which could be reduced even further if new methods for dealing with infected plants become widespread. It seems to me that the projected losses in Uganda ascribed to BXW — between USD 2 and 8 billion over the past 10 years, and projected future losses of up to 53% “if the disease is left unchecked” — are intended to push the country towards genetic engineering as the only effective response. There is a place for GMO bananas, as part of an overall approach that uses a diversity of methods and a diversity of varieties to tackle not just BXW but all the other constraints on production of bananas and plantains in East Africa.

“GM bananas can wait,” a letter to editor of SciDev.net by our friends at the International Network for the Improvement of Banana and Plantain as was, is as relevant now as it was 2 1/2 years ago. One extract:

Biotechnology is one tool among many. Banana farmers should not be scared into accepting GM bananas as the only solution to a problem for which other measures are proving effective, and which Uganda’s National Agricultural Research Organisation is also actively promoting, in addition to its work on GM bananas.

Now, how hard is that to explain?

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Swine flu roundup

As the numbers keep mounting, it is worth recalling where it all started. The epicentre of the swine flu outbreak seems to be the village of La Gloria in Veracruz. The Times has been there, of course: 2

Residents of La Gloria have long complained about the clouds of flies that are drawn the so-called “manure lagoons” created by such mega-farms, known in the agriculture business as Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs).

But they may or may not be behind the outbreak. In any case, CAFOs seem to be very different to the more traditional methods of pig rearing to be found in Mexico. The area is one of high density of production:

pig-production

No word on which of the nine or so pig breeds recorded from Mexico are involved.

LATER: GRAIN has its say. And New Scientist.