Here’s a fun thing. There’s a group pool on Flickr, the photo sharing site, called “tomatoes!” ((And also similar pools for lots of other plants.)) All kinds of pictures of all kinds of tomatoes, and very beautiful is all that diversity to look at too. But you can do more. Like for example map where the photos were taken (assuming the photographer uploaded a georeference). Which could give you a snapshot of where tomatoes are grown or consumed — or maybe just particularly loved. You can also generate a kml file. Here’s what you get when you view it in Google Earth:
Haven’t quite worked it out. This doesn’t seem to be all the georeferenced tomato photos from Europe in the group. Maybe just the latest to be uploaded. But I can’t help thinking this is a great way of displaying the geographic distribution of agricultural biodiversity.
Cooking the books
The news that the DNA in medieval parchments is to be fingerprinted has been making quite a splash. Parchments are made of animal skins, of course, and it seems that it is possible to recover DNA in decent shape — the latest example of archeogenetics. The idea is to produce “a taxonomy of manuscript manufacture,” which must be of tremendous excitement to medievalists. But John Hawks describes another possible application in his anthropological blog that’s more in line with our agrobiodiversity interests here:
…the results may be equally useful for understanding the processes of animal breeding in medieval Europe. Today’s domesticated breeds are a remnant of a much larger diversity of local breeds that once existed. People bred animals both locally by selection and across large regions by introducing favored animals from long distances. Sometimes they favored diversity — and considering the revival of interest in legacy breeds like Highland cattle.
Wish I’d thought of that…
From strip to quilt
How Jethro Tull changed English farming and landscape. No, not the band.
Their enemies are time and money…
The (London) Times Life & Style (Women) section had a feature on the Millennium Seed Bank a few days ago and somehow or other we missed it. Slap wrist.
The jars of dried seed go into the cold store, an underground library full of sliding stacks of shelves, every one full of glass jars holding even tinier glass jars. The temperature is -20C but the air-conditioning system creates a further wind-chill.
In that room, the size of a corner shop, are seeds of 10 per cent of the world’s plants. Beyond is another, larger room that one day, Smith hopes, will hold the rest. Empty shelves stretch away into the gloom.
One quibble. The article makes the Svalbard Global Seed Vault sound like a purely Norwegian affair, which of course it isn’t.
Regarding the funding of the Seed Vault, the Norwegian government funded the construction of the Vault in its entirety (this cost $9 million), and will continue to fund the maintenance of the facility, for an annual cost of circa $150,000. The Global Crop Diversity Trust funds the operation and management of the Seed Vault, as well as the transport of the seeds from developing countries to the Arctic. This second component – the transport – is possible through our work with the United Nations Foundation, a partnership which is funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
Fungi sorted
As part of a new conservation strategy, the UK is to merge two large fungal collections.
There are already 800,000 specimens of mushrooms, puffball, toadstools and micro-fungi kept in the Jodrell Laboratory at Kew, including the specimens collected by Charles Darwin. Some 400,000 collection from the CABI research institute will be added, including a specimen of Sir Alexander Fleming’s penicillin producing culture, 138 specimens of the potato blight organism and the key reference sample of the Dutch elm disease that changed the face of the English landscape in the 1970s.
I guess that must include both preserved and living material, but I could be wrong. What about doing the same rationalization for plant genetic resources collections? Well, one bit of agrobiodiversity at the time, eh?