- Dr Sandy Knapp on botanical monographs. Solanum, of course.
- Dr Joukje Buiteveld on fruit field genebanks in the Netherlands.
- NordGen adopts GRIN-Global.
- Hybrid pigeonpa in the Indian news.
- All the tea in India. And Ireland?
- The rise of craft chocolate.
- And here’s the beverage trifecta: coffee in Ethiopia.
- Seed collecting in Brazil for reforestation.
- NBPGR does medicinals.
- You wanna be a “germplasm acquisition coordinator“? I bet you do. But watch out…
- Podcast on cattle domestication. Dr Hans Lenstra from Utrecht University in the hot seat.
Coffee lost and found
Remember the paper on re-finding a couple of “lost” coffee species in Sierra Leone that we included in Brainfood a few weeks back? Thought you might. Anyway, Jeremy has an interview with the main author, NRI’s Jeremy Haggar, in Eat This Podcast this week. Have a listen, it’s a cool story.
But how will it feed into the global coffee conservation strategy?
Brainfood: Biodiversity targets, Image software, Potato efficiency, Cassava cyanide, Popcorn, Payment for agrobiodiversity, Walnut conservation, Grapevine leaves, Pigeonpea haplotypes, Chakras, Diet & diversity, Seed activism, Seed longevity
- Genetic diversity targets and indicators in the CBD post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework must be improved. Better than accession numbers? Well, yeah, but will it matter?
- FIELDimageR: An R package to analyze orthomosaic images from agricultural field trials. Extract plot-level results from your drone shots, automagically.
- Radiation Interception, Conversion and Partitioning Efficiency in Potato Landraces: How Far Are We from the Optimum? Quite far, but perhaps more interestingly you can predict tuber yield from time-series aerial imagery. Which means the above could come in useful.
- Genetic architecture and gene mapping of cyanide in cassava (Manihot esculenta Crantz.). High cyanide alleles in 2 major genes mainly found along Amazonian rivers and in coastal areas of Brazil. Drones unavailable for comment.
- Relationships among American popcorn and their links with landraces conserved in a microcenter of diversity. Did the diverse popcorns of southern Brazil derive from local diversification or independent local domestication? More work needed. Anyone going to mash this up with the cassava result above?
- Payments for agrobiodiversity conservation services: An overview of Latin American experiences, lessons learned and upscaling challenges. 5 ha of each of 100 varieties will cost you US$70,000 p.a. at a 5% discount rate. Bargain.
- Diversity Under Threat: Connecting Genetic Diversity and Threat Mapping to Set Conservation Priorities for Juglans regia L. Populations in Central Asia. Ex situ where threat level from climate change is severe, in situ where threat level due to climate change is minor, assisted natural regeneration where threat level from climate change is minor but severe from other things, like overgrazing. No word on payments for ecosystem services rendered.
- Composite modeling of leaf shape across shoots discriminates Vitis species better than individual leaves. Fancy maths used to composite leaf shapes along a shoot as a way of telling species apart.
- Superior haplotypes for haplotype‐based breeding for drought tolerance in pigeonpea (Cajanus cajan L.). From 10 genes and about 300 genotypes to 17 accessions with 4 superior haplotypes.
- Create Space for Indigenous Leadership to Preserve Agricultural Biodiversity. In the Ecuadorian Amazon, cacao production for cash is not driving down agrobiodiversity.
- Conceptual Links between Landscape Diversity and Diet Diversity: A Roadmap for Transdisciplinary Research. There are 4 different pathways whereby diverse forested landscapes can lead to diet diversity.
- ‘Keeping seeds in our hands’: the rise of seed activism. While the formal sector is still arguing about farmers’ rights, activists have moved the paradigm to seed sovereignty.
- Thirty-year monitoring and statistical analysis of 50 species’ germinability in genebank medium-term storage suggest specific characteristics in seed longevity. Huge dataset reveals some geographic variation in seed longevity within crops, among other things.
Nibbles: Seawater, NUS, Biodiversity Targets and Finance, Genebanks, Pipes
- Seawater is the next water.
- EMBRAPA’s booklets on “unconventional” vegetables.
- Money should put its money where its money is.
- Kids make genebank.
- Malta makes genebank.
- Native Americans used to smoke unusual tobacco species, and non-tobacco species too for that matter.
Measuring biodiversity next year
Just a reminder to everyone that the CBD is soliciting comments on the proposed Post-2020 global biodiversity framework.
Needless to say, Sean Hoban and colleagues have been thinking this through and are proposing genetic diversity targets and indicators, and for all species, not just crops and their wild relatives:
- the number of populations with effective population size above versus below 500
- the proportion of populations maintained within species,
- the number of species and populations in which genetic diversity is monitored using DNA-based methods.
Better than genebank accession numbers, I guess, but are they “simple” enough to measure repeatedly and consistently?
Oh, and by the way, there’s also a proposal around to have a single, headline global extinction target.