Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
A guest post from Fernando Aramburu Merlos on his recent paper with friend-of-the-blog Robert Hijmans. Four species (wheat, rice, maize, and soybean) occupy half the world’s croplands. It has been argued that this means we cannot increase crop species diversity much without changing what we eat ((Renard, D. & Tilman, D. Cultivate biodiversity to harvest …
A big thank you to Fernando Aramburu Merlos, one of the authors of a very interesting recent paper on crop rotation in the USA, for contributing this nice blog post describing his findings. If a picture is worth a thousand words, a good map is worth a million. Or, at least, that is how it …
Continue reading “Mapping crop species diversity in space and time”
If you always wanted to do species distribution modelling, it’s your lucky day. Let Robert Hijmans and Jane Elith take you by the hand. This document provides an introduction to species distribution modeling with R. Species distribution modeling (SDM) is also known under other names including climate envelope-modeling, habitat modeling, and (environmental or ecological) niche-modeling. …
Continue reading “R you interested in species distribution models?”
Breeding grass while high. Probably not what you’re thinking. When life gives you ancient lemons. Potato Museum gets new website. Mango gets a database. So do France’s genebanks. The oldest living cultivated fruit tree in North America? I think not, but interesting nevertheless. Whiskey goes heirloom. Excerpt from Spencer Wells’ Pandora’s Seed on the Neolithic …
I ran across a bunch of nice crop maps on the internet ((Though there are some strange things about a couple of them. Check out the shea one, for example.)), so I made a GIF for you (click on it to get it cycling). You’re welcome. I’m reliably informed the source is Monfreda et al. …