- Remnant genetic diversity detected in an ancient crop: Triticum dicoccon Schrank landraces from Asturias, Spain. Strong geographic differentiation even at small scales.
- Grass pea (Lathyrus sativus): Is there a case for further crop improvement? Yes, but then they would say that, wouldn’t they.
- Highly polymorphic nSSR markers: A useful tool to assess origin of North African cultivars and to provide additional proofs of secondary grapevine domestication events. North African cultivars do not derive from North African wild strains. Did anyone really think they did? Well, I guess it’s good to have the data.
- Building the niche through time: using 13,000 years of data to predict the effects of climate change on three tree species in Europe. You have to take into account past distributions when predicting future ones.
Spanish emmer
The abstract says: “…and farmers grow locally adapted landraces.” Is that locally adapted meaning: a) it is planted and grows and therefore must be locally adapted; or b) is it locally adapted in that it has evolved to the precise local conditions (and presumably will not do so well elsewhere); or c) is it locally adapted because everyone else uses this term about landraces, and we really don’t know, but it sounds good?
Both a) and c) contribute nothing useful and should not be used. Whereas b) needs experimentation to demonstrate actual local adaptation. There is some, e.g. daylength adaptation in sorghum in West Africa; heavy metal tolerance on mine spoil heaps, but these have been shown experimentally.
However, I would suggest that inverse local adaptation is more valuable a concept, where introduced crops escape co-evolved pests and diseases (tolerance with some yield penalty) in their regions of origin and perform better following introduction across oceans (or, as noted long ago by Janzen, onto islands).
The link to the tree species niche modeling item does not open. Could you check it? I want to know more about that.
Sorry. Fixed.