- The Food Systems Dashboard is a new tool to inform better food policy. 140 indicators from over 30 sources. Launching soon. Always good to have the data.
- Using Living Germplasm Collections to Characterize, Improve, and Conserve Woody Perennials. Nice review of the conservation of your favourite fruits in field genebanks (about 6% of the total number of crop accessions).
- Moving threatened plants: Story and practice. It sounds easy but it isn’t.
- Seed Germination after 30 Years Storage in Permafrost. Drying, drying, drying.
- Why Seed Physiology Is Important for Genebanking. Well, don’t you want to know why a seed lot is showing no or low germination after 30 years in permafrost? Or, alternatively, how long another one will continue to show good germination? Thought so.
- Habitat management alternatives for conservation forests in the temperate zone: Review, synthesis, and implications. 4 intervention alternatives: minimal, traditional, non-traditional and species-based. But we need long-term studies to really know what works best. Presumably longer than 30 years. This is an old paper, but it came up again because of this very thorough Twitter thread.
- High richness of exotic trees in tropical urban green spaces: Reproductive systems, fruiting and associated risks to native species. Go native. At least in Brazil. Someone should mash up with all the papers above.
- Mashes to Mashes, Crust to Crust. Presenting a novel microstructural marker for malting in the archaeological record. Look for cell wall breakdown in the grain’s aleurone layer.
- Powerful detection of polygenic selection and environmental adaptation in US beef cattle. Local adaptation is being eroded.
- Genomic-Led Potato Breeding for Increasing Genetic Gains: Achievements and Outlook. The future is true seed-propagated F1 diploid hybrids produced by crossing inbred diploid lines. Oh, plus gene editing here and there.
- Reply to: Evaluating two different models of peanut’s origin. Did the polyploidization event which gave rise to Arachis hypogaea occur ~450,000 years ago or <10,000 years ago? The authors who said the former double down.
- Lost and Found: Coffea stenophylla and C. affinis, the Forgotten Coffee Crop Species of West Africa. Let the interbreeding commence.
- The proportion of soil-borne pathogens increases with warming at the global scale. Be afraid.
“High richness of exotic trees..” [in Brazilian town] At 51% this is actually low: for crops it would be up to 70% (both Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa), similarly for plantation forestry. A probable reason is they escape co-evolved natives pests and diseases.