- High Royal Jelly-Producing Honeybees (Apis mellifera ligustica) (Hymenoptera: Apidae) in China. China supplies 90% of the global market?
- Taking Advantage of Natural Biodiversity for Wine Making: The WILDWINE Project. Back to the future, via yeast diversity.
- Conservation of Landrace: The Key Role of the Value for Agrobiodiversity Conservation. An Application on Ancient Tomatoes Varieties. Fancy maths shows farmer maintaining heirloom tomato variety in Perugia could be charging more.
- Are changes in global oil production influencing the rate of deforestation and biodiversity loss? Less oil production, more agricultural expansion, more biodiversity loss.
- Grazing vs. mowing: A meta-analysis of biodiversity benefits for grassland management. Grazing. Probably. The data sucks.
- Maize diversity associated with social origin and environmental variation in Southern Mexico. Ethnicity trumps altitude in genetic patterning. Morphology is all over the place.
- Genetics in conservation management: Revised recommendations for the 50/500 rules, Red List criteria and population viability analyses. One we missed. 100/1000 is the new 50/500. Multiply by 10 for census population sizes to avoid inbreeding and retain evolutionary potential, respectively.
- Advances in genomics for the improvement of quality in Coffee. We’ll need to sequence the wild species too.
Nibbles: PPB, AnGR, Children of the corn, African wildlife & China, Japanese plastic food, Hedge balls, Falanghina et al., NY hipster kava bar, Genetics & diet
- The next step in the evolution of participatory plant breeding is evolutionary plant breeding.
- 1458 livestock breeds are in trouble.
- A blast from corn’s past. In more ways than one, as this article from High Country News is kinda old.
- The Chinese market in African wildlife is bad for both.
- Let them eat plastic.
- Maclura pomifera is apparently all the rage in Iowa.
- There’s more to Italian wine than chianti.
- “You can’t really get fucked up on kava.” I beg to differ.
- Two independent pieces on the continuing evolution of humans to cope with their diet: starch, milk and meat.
Cooperation-88 featured in National Geographic
Farmers once cultivated a wider array of genetically diverse crop varieties, but modern industrialized agriculture has focused mainly on a commercially successful few. Now a rush is on to save the old varieties—which could hold genetic keys to de- veloping crops that can adapt to climate change. “No country is self-sufficient with its plant genetic resources,” says Francisco Lopez, of the secretariat of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture. The group oversees the exchange of seeds and other plant materials that are stored in the world’s 1,750 gene banks. — Kelsey Nowakowski
That’s the introduction to a nice feature in the current National Geographic, part of the series The Future of Food. Problem is, I can’t find it online any more. I swear it was there, but it’s not any more. Maybe it was a copyright issue, and it will come back later, when National Gepgraphic is good and ready.
Anyway, the piece is entitled The Potato Challenge:
Potatoes in southwestern China had long been plagued by disease, so scientists began searching for blight-resistant varieties that could be grown in tropical highlands. By the mid-1990s researchers at Yunnan Normal University in China and the International Potato Center (CIP) in Peru had created a new resistant spud using Indian and Filipino potatoes.
The resistant spud is Cooperation-88, of course, and if and when the piece finds its way online you’ll be able to admire some fancy infographics summarizing how it was developed and the impact it has had.
Nibbles: Variety names, Biotech infographic, Satoyama, Wendell Berry, Eating bugs
- Mike Jackson wants to know how many crop varieties you can name. Please tell him. My number is 42.
- This is what CRISPR looks like. In an infographic, that is.
- Japan’s rice terraces were better for biodiversity when they were, you know, full of rice.
- A Wendell Berry biopic?
- Yep, more on eating insects. It’s definitely a thing now.
Nibbles: Salumi, Skirret, Bananas, Potatoes, Cotton, Aurochs
- How to tell your prosciutto cotto from your crudo.
- How cotton got to be cotton. Or cottons, actually.
- How to grow skirret.
- How to save bananas and potatoes.
- How to bring back the aurochs.