announcements urban forestry data and photos due this week. submit to cici and we'll trade the...

Announcements

Urban Forestry data and photos due THIS week. Submit to Cici and we'll trade the data.

Your lab this week is then to identify the trees from the photos provided by your classmates.

Reading.

Writing assignment due Oct 18.

Choose one of the characteristics out of Table 1, find an interesting citation. Find that citation on the Web of Science and discuss 3 other papers that have cited the citation you chose.

Summing up evolution and evolutionary research

Levels of selection

Natural selection and fitness

Instability of climates and communities

The mysterious speciation process

Systematics and taxonomy

October 28, 2011 – 7 PM – Allen Theatre

Teocinte Corn

Corn smut

Barbara McClintock discovered jumping genes or transposons in the 50s

Grafting is necessary for fruit trees to get productive crops

One tree – two types of fruit

Doane, a senior executive at Monsanto, cited a number of statistics:

· A world population of more than 9 billion is on the horizon, compared with today’s figure of 6.7 billion.

· Standards of living are rising in many developing countries, a trend that continues to mean greater demand for more and better quality food. As one example, annual demand for corn is expected to be 1.6 billion metric tons by 2050, compared with the current level of some 800 million metric tons.

· Only a comparatively small amount of additional land is available for "responsible" cultivation to achieve higher production.


· Agriculture, already a large user of water, faces increased competition from urban areas for available supplies.

· U.S. agriculture accounts for about 19 percent of the nation’s consumption of fossil fuels at a time when concerns are increasing about the impact of those fuels on climate change.


· Helping corn, soybean and cotton farmers attain yields by 2030 double those achieved in 2000.

· Reducing the use of key resources by 1/3 per unit of output over the same period.

· Improving the lives of farmers by making agriculture more productive.

Monsanto

Monsanto terminator technology

http://www.monsanto.com/newsviews/Pages/terminator-seeds.aspx

Synthetic biology

http://www.nature.com/nature/comics/syntheticbiologycomic/index.html

http://www.syntheticgenomics.com/index.html



http://www.syntheticgenomics.com/index.html