Nibbles: Brazil flora & urban ag, Telling species apart, Canary seed for humans, Training breeders, Solitary bees, Tajik protected area, Rennell Island, Nordic grubs, Belize TV

Brazil’s flora moves online. And its agriculture into its favelas.
Taxonomy 101.
Wish the people who wrote this press release on “canary seed” had taken a taxonomy course. It’s Phalaris canariensis, it turns out.
African breeders to be trained at UCDavis. Ok, but what about WACCI? What’s going on? Cornell-Davis smackdown?
Further proof, if any were needed, of the importance of wild bees.
Tajikistan gets its first World Heritage Site. Includes most of the Pamirs, so surely a whole lot of agricultural biodiversity, both wild and cultivated, plant and animal. Not that that was the prime mover for protection, probably.
Incidentally, there’s a list of World Heritage Sites in danger, and it includes Rennell Island in the Solomons. The reason I bring it up is that it is famous for a local coconut variety. Hope that’s not endangered!
Nordic Food Lab gets money to experiment with cooking insects.
Belize TV looks to agrobiodiversity to cope with climate change.

A paean to diverse diets is just what we all need.
And another one, from the MIT Technology Review of all places.
Menawhile, there’s only one reference to dietary diversity in the World Bank’s investment framework for nutrition.
Maybe you have to quantify that diversity before you can save it? Now where have I heard that before?
Meanwhile, Europe reports on biodiversity-friendly farming practices. Does that include the biodiversity of the actual crops? Perhaps surprisingly, yes!
You want biodiversity-friendly farming practices? Talk to Indigenous people. The Committee on World Food Security (CFS) has launched an e-consultation on “Preserving, strengthening and promoting Indigenous Peoples’ food and knowledge systems and traditional practices for sustainable food systems.”
There’s diversity in asparagus too.
Genebanks can help with those biodiversity-friendly practices, diverse diets and rops and Indigenous practices.
Even big international genebanks.
Even the Svalbard Global Seed Vault.
But some are in trouble.
Though others are coming back.