Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Or any other food, for that matter, at least in the US. Well, now there’s The Rhythm of Food for all the answers, in nice visualizations to boot.
And if anyone knows why Americans do more searching for coconut during the winter holidays, and then again in spring, do tell us.
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I completely missed an interesting blog post by Prof. Andy Lowe of the University of Adelaide when it came out a couple of years ago. “Local is not always best” updates a paper in a previous article1 on where you should get your seeds from for habitat restoration projects. In summary, the answer is: not all from one, nearby place.
To simulate the natural mixing of genes during a restoration programme, it would be necessary to restore populations using a mixture of material sampled at different distances from the focal site, a practise defined as composite provenancing. This ‘composite provenance’ would be predominantly composed of locally sourced material, taken from genetically healthy stock, but would also incorporate local and ecogeographically matched sources. In addition, a smaller proportion of material, depending on the natural gene flow dynamics of the focal species (but usually somewhere between 10 and 30%), should be comprised of material from much further a field.
Though Prof. Lowe deals with wild species in his paper and blog post, I think “composite provenancing” is also be relevant for crops. Sometimes, too much is made of “genetic integrity” and localism.
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Nibbles Archive: All that condensed goodness.
And easy access to the Brainfood Archive.
Marc Deletre clarifies that yam bean paper:
Yep, you’re right, the species’ names should be in the reverse order [in the abstract]. As it is it suggests that P. ahipa is the progenitor, but actually it’s the opposite.
Sometimes, you just have to read the whole paper.
