- Catastrophic Declines in Wilderness Areas Undermine Global Environment Targets. 10% of supposedly remote wilderness areas gone since the early 1990s.
- Genetic diversity trend in Indian rice varieties: an analysis using SSR markers. The diversity of rice varieties released in India has been decreasing, but only of late.
- Genotypic and phenotypic changes in wild barley (Hordeum vulgare subsp. spontaneum) during a period of climate change in Jordan. There were changes in climate on one side and phenotype and genotype on the other, but it was difficult to find a connection between the two.
- EST-SSR Based Genetic Diversity and Population Structure among Korean Landraces of Foxtail Millet (Setaria italica L.). As is often the case, there’s no geographic structure, unless there is.
- Domestication of jute mallow (Corchorus olitorius L.): ethnobotany, production constraints and phenomics of local cultivars in Ghana. Let the breeding begin.
- Similar estimates of temperature impacts on global wheat yield by three independent methods. Down by about 5% for a 1°C global temperature increase, no matter how you slice it.
- Genome-wide association mapping of provitamin A carotenoid content in cassava. SNPs associated with carotenoid content in cassava roots found in vicinity of known gene responsible for increase in accumulation of provitamin A carotenoids in cassava roots.
Wilderness areas: The report defines wilderness as “biologically and ecologically largely intact landscapes that are mostly free of human disturbance”. This might to adequate for deserts and tundra with very low human populations, but not for Amazonian forest, which had active human management pre-conquest (and huge population loss after conquest). Most tropical forest globally has been subject to shifting cultivation over thousands of years. Using terms such as `virgin’ and `pristine’ is fanciful. The only real wildernesses today are US national parks – kicking out indigenous peoples and turning landscape into theme parks – the Yellowstone model that a vast multinational conservationist business has tried to impose on developing countries. What is `catastrophic’ is stopping people learning about economic botany, including medicinal species and how to domesticate crops.