- Resilience and livestock adaptations to demographic growth and technological change: A diachronic perspective from the Late Bronze Age to Late Antiquity in NE Iberia. The changing balance between sheep, cattle and pigs through time was driven by socio-economics more than environment.
- Heat stress will detrimentally impact future livestock production in East Africa. 4-19% of livestock production will have more heat to cope with.
- Pastoralism in the highest peaks: Role of the traditional grazing systems in maintaining biodiversity and ecosystem function in the alpine Himalaya. A ban on grazing would be counter-productive.
- The evolving interface between pastoralism and uncertainty : reflecting on cases from three continents. Adaptive herd management, livelihood mosaics, persisting mobility, reticular territories, and articulated social networks have been enough, but for how long more?
- Redefinition of the Mora Romagnola Pig Breed Herd Book Standard Based on DNA Markers Useful to Authenticate Its “Mono-Breed” Products: An Example of Sustainable Conservation of a Livestock Genetic Resource. Fraudsters beware.
- Estimating the genetic diversity of Pacific salmon and trout using multigene eDNA metabarcoding. DNA was recovered from the water, for pity’s sake.
Bean there, done that
Back in the day, together with co-authors Nigel Maxted and Edwin Chiwona, I used maps from the Atlas of Common Bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) Production in Africa 1 in a little thing called A Methodological Model for Ecogeographic Surveys of Crops. I don’t remember what software we used, and how difficult it was to do, as it was getting on for 25 years ago, but I suspect it was a bit of struggle mashing up the maps with genebank accession locality data.
Well, there’s a new edition of the atlas out, and, thanks to Genesys and Google Earth, it’s not quite so difficult (the colours represent ecologically distinct bean production areas).
Which is not to say it couldn’t be a bit easier. I mean, why not allow people to import their own data on the atlas’ nifty online interactive maps?
Oh, and BTW, only a tiny percentage of bean accessions from Kenya are geo-referenced, so that hasn’t changed much in 25 years.
Virtual veggie visit
Want to know what happens in a genebank? Do you have 8 minutes to spare?
More on the UK Vegetable Genebank for those who prefer to read.
No word on whether breeding vegetables is as tough as potatoes.
Nibbles: Transformation, Livestock pod, Coffee pod, GHUs, Viz double, Yaupon, Wild foods, GRIN, Korean vegetables, Oz Indigenous bakers, Warwick vegetables
- IAASTD ten years on. Not many people hurt.
- Interesting new ILRI podcast hits the airwaves.
- And here’s another new podcast: A History of Coffee. So far so pretty good.
- Meanwhile, CIP rounds up recent webinars on germplasm health.
- Fun visualizations on the seasonality of food.
- Speaking of visualizations, RAWGraphs is a pretty neat tool.
- North America used to have a native caffeinated beverage, the attractively named Ilex vomitoria.
- Maybe South Africa’s local wild foods have a better chance.
- Using USDA’s genebank database, GRIN.
- Not sure if this Korean-American farmer does (access USDA’s genebank database, do keep up), but probably.
- I wonder if any of these Australian wild foods will find their way into a genebank, just in case.
- Genebanks like the UK veggie one at Warwick.
Breeding potatoes back in the day
Via William Whitson of Cultivariable on Facebook comes this nice quote about potato breeding:
It’s from an article by Drs P. Grun and J. Staub in a CIP publication from 1979: Report of the Planning Conference on the Exploration, Taxonomy and Maintenance of Potato Germ Plasm III.
I wonder how much things have changed?
LATER: Maybe this much?