I’ve been dipping into my newly-acquired copy of the recent reprint of L.S.B Leakey’s classic The Southern Kikuyu Before 1903, and as luck would have it I happened on this:
Was not aware that Kenyans needed a reason for beer parties.
Nibbles: Svalbard, Irish Seed Savers Association podcast, Heirloom tomatoes, Rice genomes, Avocado history, 3D seeds, Agroforestry, Canarium development, IK, Indian nutrition, Biofortification, Salvia, Biorepositories best practices, Neurolathyrism
- The Smallholder on Svalbard. Martha unavailable for comment.
- Jeremy’s latest bit of blarney.
- Tasty toms.
- A bunch more rice genomes. Wait, didn’t we Brainfood this? Of course we did, ages ago.
- Avocado tattoos?
- 3D seeds. So beautiful, so useless.
- Trees as technology.
- Like galip nut, for instance.
- My indigenous knowledge is your climate change adaptation.
- Maharashtra: Malnutrition down, high blood pressure up.
- Could probably still do with some biofortification.
- The botany of chia.
- ISBER Best Practices for biological repositories: The Webinar.
- Meet ODAP.
Brainfood: MSB value, Wild rice genomes, Media coverage, Ancient turkeys, Diverse covers, ABS & sequences, Red listing, Old crops, Wild pollinators, Rice breeding, Farm & dietary diversity, Forages positives, Kurdish sheep
- The conservation value of germplasm stored at the Millennium Seed Bank, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, UK. 10% of about 40,000 taxa, >8% of collections, are either extinct, rare or vulnerable at global and/or national level; 20% of taxa, representing 13% collections, are endemic at the country or territory scale. And the cost, though?
- Genomes of 13 domesticated and wild rice relatives highlight genetic conservation, turnover and innovation across the genus Oryza. Lots of things for breeders to play around with. Australians especially pleased.
- Our House Is Burning: Discrepancy in Climate Change vs. Biodiversity Coverage in the Media as Compared to Scientific Literature. Biodiversity conservation community really bad at getting the message out.
- Diversity of management strategies in Mesoamerican turkeys: archaeological, isotopic and genetic evidence. Separate domestications in Mesoamerica and SW USA; two types in former, one fed crops and the other, more flamboyant type, left to roam; neither eaten.
- Functional traits in cover crop mixtures: Biological nitrogen fixation and multifunctionality. Design mixtures with complementary plant traits for maximum on-farm benefit.
- Plant genetic resources for food and agriculture: opportunities and challenges emerging from the science and information technology revolution. The future is Norway.
- Quantifying progress toward a conservation assessment for all plants. A quarter done.
- The earliest occurrence of a newly described domesticate in Eastern North America: Adena/Hopewell communities and agricultural innovation. Erect knotweed used to be a crop, a mainstay of the Eastern Agricultural Complex. Now it’s a weed. Can the same be said of other plants? Well, maybe.
- Conserving honey bees does not help wildlife. Wild bees, that is.
- Breeding implications of drought stress under future climate for upland rice in Brazil. Wide adaptation of upland rice in Brazil is not going to cut it.
- Farm production diversity and dietary quality: linkages and measurement issues. Cash is often better than production diversity at predicting dietary diversity.
- Tropical forage legumes for environmental benefits: An overview. Ruminant livestock production need not be bad for the environment. Useful list of research needs to make sure.
- Complete mitogenomes from Kurdistani sheep: abundant centromeric nuclear copies representing diverse ancestors. There are lots of bits of mitochondrial DNA near the centromeres of all chromosomes bar the Y. Is that a problem for phylogenies?
Nibbles: African pollinators, Wild wheat, Brazilian meet, Bamboo meet, Old seeds, Rice diversity, 5282, Frozen grapes
- Call for proposals on African pollinator informatics.
- The Linnean Society puts “Wheat Taxonomy: the legacy of John Percival” online. Heroes all.
- The Brazilian genetic resources congress gets a Facebook page.
- There’s also a bamboo and rattan congress coming up.
- A time capsule is dug up in Canada, and it’s got seeds!
- Seeking rice SNPs? Use snp-seek.
- What links the Dutch Easy India Company with a measles outbreak in the US? The answer will probably not surprise you.
- We really need some new wine grape cultivars. I mean REALLY new.
Martha has a winner!
https://twitter.com/Prizeo/status/959228601899061250
Congratulations, Jennifer. Have a great time.