- Broadening the Base, Narrowing the Task: Prioritizing Crop Wild Relative Taxa for Conservation Action. Use socioeconomic value of crop, and potential usefulness and threat status of relative.
- Germinate 3: Development of a Common Platform to Support the Distribution of Experimental Data on Crop Wild Relatives. Useful in determining the second of the above.
- Re-defining the yam (Dioscorea spp.) core collection using morphological traits. Cleaning up the core.
- “Things are different now”: Farmer perceptions of cultural ecosystem services of traditional rice landscapes in Vietnam and the Philippines. 73 indicators for the contribution of landscapes to culture, aesthetics, and local knowledge.
- A single-nucleotide polymorphism causes smaller grain size and loss of seed shattering during African rice domestication. You want no shattering? You also get smaller seeds. Like it or edit it.
- Digital conservation: An introduction. Brave new world… Special issue of Ambio.
- The Genomic History Of Southeastern Europe. Souther Greek Neolithic farmers not same as other European Neolithic farmers.
- Genomics of a revived breed: Case study of the Belgian campine cattle. Racial impurities are confined to a few farms.
- Reducing emissions from agriculture to meet the 2 °C target. We’re doomed.
- Conservation of biodiversity as a strategy for improving human health and well-being. By keeping animals and their nasty diseases away from people, we’re not talking communing with Nature here.
- The interaction of human population, food production, and biodiversity protection. Minimise the interaction.
- Nature’s pulse power: legumes, food security and climate change. Special issue of Journal of Experimental Botany on legumes. Eat up your beans!
Good question?
Why can't @DeccanChronicle and @cnni get the right photo of crops? Originals: https://t.co/Rnk2PueDwi and https://t.co/yu3kDLhYqB pic.twitter.com/npPx0zVEXN
— AgroBioDiverse (@AgroBioDiverse) May 30, 2017
Crop wild relatives on Costing the Earth on the BBC
Botanist James Wong investigates the links between global warming and the rate at which crops are able to adapt and evolve to rapidly changing conditions.
That includes how crop wild relatives can help.
The money quote:
The first rule of intelligent tinkering is you don’t throw away any of the parts just because you’re not sure what they’re for.
Lathyrism and stunting
In a comment on a recent post on nutrition in India, Dirk Enneking, who should know, suggests that:
In the Central Provinces [of India] there seems to be a close overlap between severe stunting in children and historical neurolathyrism epidemics.
His reference for the latter is a 1927 publication with some pleasantly old-fashioned maps. He may well be onto something. I was able to superimpose the stunting map from the previous post and an image of the 1927 map on the distribution of lathyrism. 1 This is it:
It’s not great, I know: I haven’t had the time (and don’t have the skills anyway) for the full-blown GIS treatment. But it does seem to be the case that historical areas of lathyrism (darker patches) are confined to areas where stunting is still prevalent (red).
Over to the experts for an explanation.
Complementarity between informal and formal seed systems
The webinar. Today. Register quick.
Complementarity between the informal and formal seed systems will be approached in a holistic way through this webinar. Not only do the conservation and innovation systems need to integrate the formal and informal seed systems to benefit from one another’s capacity and value added, but new policies and legal measures need to be formulated to ensure the recognition and implementation of the rights of farmers.