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July 2, 2026July 2, 2026

A brief history of gap analysis for crop diversity conservation

Many thanks to long-time friend-of-the-blog Dr Colin Khoury for this latest contribution. Conservation gap analysis using Geographic Information System (GIS) tools relies on several sources of biological and environmental data, including in situ species occurrences and climatic and other environmental variables used to conduct species distribution modeling, as well as passport data from ex situ …

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April 22, 2022April 22, 2022

How diverse can croplands be?

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 . Radically shifting our diets is a tall order, …

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October 8, 2020October 8, 2020

Mapping crop species diversity in space and time

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 …

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September 3, 2018September 4, 2018

R you interested in species distribution models?

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. …

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June 13, 2018

Nibbles: Phenotyping drones, Citrus history, Potato museum, Mango database, Florilege, Endicott Pear, Landrace booze, Neolithic Revolution, Easy mapping

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 …

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