Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
Crop diversity trends captured by Indigenous and local knowledge: introduction to the symposium. A whole symposium on how Indigenous knowledge reveals widespread loss of traditional crops and landraces, and the increasing adoption of high-yielding varieties, driven by economic, political, climatic, and sociocultural forces. Landraces and climate change: global trends through the lens of political agroecology. …
Future flooding tolerant rice germplasm: Resilience afforded beyond Sub1A gene. You want to make rapid breeding progress? You need the “Transition from Trait to Environment” approach. As far as I can tell, this means that you fix your trait of interest in a pool of elite parents before using it in proper yield breeding. Prioritizing …
Conventional agriculture increases global warming while decreasing system sustainability. The global warming potential of conventional grain agriculture has increased x8 from 1961-2020, whereas sustainability index has decreased x3. Whatever are we to do? Adoption of improved crop varieties limited biodiversity losses, terrestrial carbon emissions, and cropland expansion in the tropics. Crop improvements from 1961–2015 resulted …
Floristic classifications and bioregionalizations are not predictors of intra-specific evolutionary patterns. You can’t use spatial structures in interspecific diversity to predict spatial structure in instraspecific diversity. Gotta do the hard work, there are no shortcuts. Intraspecific trait variability in wild plant populations predicts neither variability nor performance in a common garden. You can’t use intraspecific …
Genetic diversity loss in the Anthropocene. Don’t get excited, I don’t think the method translates to cultivated species, but fancy maths says we’ve lost on average 10% of the genetic diversity within species. A graphical causal model for resolving species identity effects and biodiversity–ecosystem function correlations. Yeah, but don’t forget that species level diversity is …