- Assessment of Genetic Diversity and Population Structure in a Global Reference Collection of 531 Accessions of Carthamus tinctorius L. (Safflower) Using AFLP Markers. Bayesian analysis of genetic diversity of global (43 countries) collection held in India reveals 19 geographic groups, with most diversity in the Near East and Iran–Afghanistan regions.
- Molecular evaluation of orphan Afghan common wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) landraces collected by Dr. Kihara using single nucleotide polymorphic markers. Analysis (Bayesian, natch) of genetic diversity of over 400 wheat landraces collected 1950-1970 and conserved at the Kihara Institute for Biological Research, Japan reveals agroecological patterning and hotspot in Badakhshan province.
- Sources of pest resistance in cassava. Analysis of 89 trials over 25 years involving the CIAT cassava collection identifies 129 landraces with high resistance to thrips, 33 to green mites and 19 to whiteflies.
- Screening sweetpotato genotypes for tolerance to drought stress. Days to permanent wilting point (DPWP) points to 8 promising clones in Kenya.
- Olive domestication and diversification in the Mediterranean Basin. About 400 wild and cultivated accessions divide up into W, central and E groups and show evidence of admixture among them and local domestication events.
- The Multiple Functions and Services of Community Seedbanks. More than just conservation.
- Diversification practices reduce organic to conventional yield gap. More data and fancier maths finds a lower organic yield gap (20%), which is halved by multi-cropping and crop rotations.
- Conserving landraces and improving livelihoods: how to assess the success of on farm conservation projects? All you need is two graphs.
- Finding Our Way through Phenotypes. “We urge all biologists, data managers, and clinicians to actively support the development, evaluation, refinement, and adoption of methodologies, tools, syntaxes, and standards for capturing and computing over phenotypic data and to collaborate in bringing about a coordinated approach.” Amen.
- Wild food in Europe: A synthesis of knowledge and data of terrestrial wild food as an ecosystem service. 65 million people collect, and at least 100 million consume, wild food. But only 81 plants? Thought it would be more. But even so, quite an ecosystem service.
As usual, thank you for all the great leads. The link to ‘Conserving landraces and improving livelihoods: how to assess the success of on farm conservation projects? All you need is two graphs’ didn’t work for me. Would you mind posting that again? Gracias~
The link is fine, but slow to load. Try this alternative.
I remain very doubtful about the value of on-farm conservation in addressing climate change: there are better ways of getting sounder results, namely collecting and ex-situ evaluation leading to breeding link to seed systems. In a couple of papers published around than twenty years ago we looked at the value of `dynamic’ conservation on-farm [D. Wood and J. Lenné 1993, 1997]. These looked at the cropping system and the ability to change over time better to meet changing conditions, but much more by crop and varietal introduction than by the ability of individual varieties of adapt over decades or millennia. These ideas were based on the enormous value of crop introduction (needed as local crops and varieties get `old and tired’ from a losing battle with biotic constraints), on seed systems on a range of scales, and on the everlasting (and sometimes desperate) search by farmers in drier environments for new varieties (at one time I was told, specifically,: `From other countries’).
Given we are thirty years into on-farm conservation, there is a shameful lack of clear evidence for adaptive change of individual varieties uninfluenced by crossing from other varieties. For example, this Bellon et al. paper gives only one reference to supposed adaptive evolution on farm (Vigouroux et al., 2011b), which is a paper on pearl millet: `Selection for earlier flowering crop associated with climatic variations in the Sahel’ [ DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0019563 ] However, from the evidence in this pearl millet paper it is impossible to dismiss the confusing factor of the introduction of new, earlier-flowering, varieties and the subsequent crossing of these with existing varieties. This is very thin evidence indeed to hang general recommendations for on-farm conservation to allow evolutionary response to climate change.
If you want early maturity in pearl millet read the story of Okashana 1 in Namibia, based on the West African farmers’ early maturing variety `Iniadi’.
It is far more likely that cropping system adaptive change comes predominantly not from autochthonous varieties over time but from off-farm seed systems form near and (very) far. It seems that plant breeders, agronomists, and seed specialist can better help farmers in the introduction of pre-adapted varieties than any wait-and-see on-farm conservation project. There are vast CGIAR data-bases going back 50 years on regional trials with improved and landrace germplasm of dozens of species that could be trawled for pre-adaptations to various modes of climate change.
With the need for dynamic management of cropping systems the term `on-farm conservation’ should be consigned to the scrap-heap.