Brainfood: Food sustainability, Phenotyping barriers, Andean agrobiodiversity, Mango diversity, Wild Brassica diversity, Domestication database, Future crops, Great Dying, Food supplies, Nutritious ag, Wild olives, Pink cassava, Landrace diversity

Global map and indicators of food system sustainability. Includes crop diversity, based on Khoury et al.
Phenotyping and Plant Breeding: Overcoming the Barriers. Mostly comes down to good experimental design.
The Spatial-Temporal Dynamics of Potato Agrobiodiversity in the Highlands of Central Peru: A Case Study of Smallholder Management across Farming Landscapes. Intensification and upward movement, while maintaining diversity.
Diversity of a Large Collection of Natural Populations of Mango (Mangifera indica Linn.) Revealed by Agro-Morphological and Quality Traits. Lowish diversity, but not so low as to fail to provide year-round production.
Intraspecific diversification of the crop wild relative Brassica cretica Lam. using demographic model selection. Diverse populations do not necessarily mean diverse adaptation.
Crop Origins and Phylo Food: A database and a phylogenetic tree to stimulate comparative analyses on the origins of food crops. When and where current crops were domesticated.
The climatic challenge: Which plants will people use in the next century? When and where future crops will be domesticated.
Earth system impacts of the European arrival and Great Dying in the Americas after 1492. 56 million deaths.
Multidimensional characterization of global food supply from 1961 to 2013. Animal-source foods + sugar up in the East, down in the West. Everybody’s eating their vegetables.
Exploring solution spaces for nutrition-sensitive agriculture in Kenya and Vietnam. Could grown more, and different, vegetables.
Evaluation of early vigor traits in wild olive germplasm. Potential as dwarfing rootstocks.
Agronomic and biochemical evaluation of cassava clones with roots that have pink pulp. 2 of 9 from the Embrapa collection have potential.
Management Practices and Breeding History of Varieties Strongly Determine the Fine Genetic Structure of Crop Populations: A Case Study Based on European Wheat Populations. Landraces show more intra-sample diversity than modern varieties. Wait, there must be more to it than that…
High-resolution and bias-corrected CMIP5 projections for climate change impact assessments. 7 TB of data for your delectation, thanks to CGIAR.

Fresh Nibbles

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.

Published on November 7, 2024

Leave a Reply Cancel reply