- Nordics upgrade genebank database.
- Crowdsourcing Wollemi pine conservation.
- Corals need a genebank too. And a database and crowdsourcing as well, no doubt.
- Though I’m not sure they’ll be able to make the food security argument.
- Or bring chefs on board.
- What would a community genebank look like for coral, I wonder. And are they hiring?
Quinoa symposium moves online
My name is Daniel Packer, I’m a quinoa breeder with the Sustainable Seed Systems Lab at Washington State University. I’d like to briefly reach out to you about the 2020 International Quinoa Research Symposium to be held on August 17-19 and hosted by the Sustainable Seed Systems Lab and the Food Systems Program at Washington State University. This event will be held entirely online, registration is free, and the material will be provided in both English and Spanish.
This Symposium will include recorded field walks, interactive poster sessions, discussion forums, and talks on topics such as Ancestral Knowledge, Genetic Resources and Wild Relatives, Market Analysis, and others by the international quinoa community.
We would love to spread the word about this Symposium as wide as possible.
Glad to help. Sounds like a hoot.
Nibbles: Mexico CC, Europe CC, Andean CC, CSA, Seeds, GIAHS, China genebank, Maize domestication, Coffee history, Conservation book
- Interactive website on bioclimatic corridors in Mexico. Bits don’t work, though.
- Interactive website on climate analogues for Europe.
- How Andean farmers are coping with the kind of changes mapped above.
- Oh dear, climate smart agriculture is a myth anyway.
- But saving seeds isn’t, thankfully.
- Still not enough linkage with the GIAHS, though, but maybe this course will fix that.
- Maybe start with peafowl? China shows us how.
- How maize became a staple: quite early, and quite quickly, basically.
- Not much coffee in early English coffeehouses. Amsterdam’s coffeeshops unavailable for comment.
- Open-access magnum opus: Conservation Research, Policy and Practice.
A Pavlovsk anniversary
It was almost exactly 10 years ago that the whole Pavlovsk thing blew up. Time does fly. For our younger readers, that’s the Vavilov Institute’s (VIR) Pavlovsk Experimental Station, where important collections of fruits and berries are conserved in rather beautiful field genebanks. For a couple of years, these were under threat, as the land they occupied was earmarked for a housing development. In the end, the threat was averted, thanks to spirited lobbying by VIR, and a little help from their friends in the international genebank community. I haven’t heard anything untoward for some years now, so I assume everything is ok, but maybe I’ll just make sure.
LATER: It seems no news is indeed good news, at least in this instance.
Brainfood: Stress, Peasants’ rights, Maize domestication, Plant diversity, Teff evaluation, Red clover diversity, WTP, AnGR cryo, Sheep history, Population & biodiversity, Planet proofing, Cassava map
- Rapid detection of stressed agricultural environments in Africa under climatic change 2000–2050 using agricultural resource indices and a hotspot mapping approach. Even some coldspots will turn hot.
- The UN Declaration on Peasants’ Rights (UNDROP): Is Article 19 on seed rights adequately balancing intellectual property rights and the right to food? What do you think?
- The genetic architecture of the maize progenitor, teosinte, and how it was altered during maize domestication. Domestication worked on lots and lots of really small-effect QTLs.
- Areas of plant diversity — What do we know? Quite a lot, actually.
- Current and projected eco-geographic adaptation and phenotypic diversity of Ethiopian teff (Eragrostis teff) across its cultivation range. Genebank collection thoroughly evaluated. Genebank unavailable for comment.
- Population structure and genetic diversity in red clover (Trifolium pratense L.) germplasm. Genotyping shows 4 geographic groups, with some linked phenotypic differences.
- ‘Warehouse’ or research centre? Analyzing public preferences for conservation, pre-breeding and characterization activities at the Czech genebank. Research centre, but only up to a point.
- Pollen Cryopreservation for Plant Breeding and Genetic Resources Conservation. Gotta wonder what the public preference for conserving pollen might be.
- The recent state of cryopreservation techniques for ex-situ gene conservation and breeding purposes in small ruminants: A review. Oocytes and embryos need more work than pollen.
- Archaeogenetic analysis of Neolithic sheep from Anatolia suggests a complex demographic history since domestication. Domestication bottleneck, followed by diversity increase due to admixture. Too late to cryo, alas.
- A systematic review of biodiversity and demographic change: A misinterpreted relationship? High human population numbers are usually bad for biodiversity, but not everywhere and not always.
- A re-boot of tropical agriculture benefits food production, rural economies, health, social justice and the environment. Plant cool species on degraded farmland. Especially where human population density is high?
- CassavaMap, a fine-resolution disaggregation of cassava production and harvested area in Africa in 2014. Always good to have the next crop production map.