- Botanic gardens get into the restoration business. So that people can again eat nutritious forest foods. No, really, even the BBC says so.
- Militant Filipino NGOs target IRRI. Not for the first time. And probably not the last.
- Anyone planning to go to the Beltain at Butser Ancient Farm? Only a month to go…
- You are probably already using at least one of these.
- Paris looking to go all sheepish.
- I don’t know about you, but I immediately turn off when somebody says that X is the only answer to Y. Even when the X is agro-ecology.
- Même s’ils le disent en français.
- Chinese “board beans” are actually lablab shock.
- You going to spend an evening at The Genome Analysis Centre discussing the value of genebanks? Tell us about it!
- Dutch seed savers looking to get organized.
- New York times goes overboard for Digital Green participatory video.
Way too much of a mediocre thing
This post may just be too meta for most busy readers, but I just had to get the sequence right in my head, so apologies, and feel free to go and make a cup of coffee or watch the Svalbard video again instead of reading any further.
It all started with a Science paper entitled “Wild Pollinators Enhance Fruit Set of Crops Regardless of Honey Bee Abundance.” It popped up in our RSS readers here in late February, if memory serves, and we duly included it in a Brainfood in early March, together with a link to an NPR story dated 1 March and a facetious comment to the effect that it is difficult to add anything to the title. NPR did try its best, though, linking to another paper on pollinators published in Science at the same time, for example.
And there it rested, and arguably should have stayed. But then, on 27 March, SciDevNet did a story on that first Science paper, pretty much out of the blue, even highlighting the fact that it was a month old. In my opinion, it really didn’t add much to the NPR story, though it did link to another, earlier and much narrower, study by the paper’s lead author, the wonderfully named Lucas Garibaldi.
Which brings us to Mongabay. Normally totally on the ball, they waited until 3 April to publish their take on Garibaldi’s original Science paper. And really, to be honest, again they added very little to what NPR had said. Or indeed to the paper’s title, for that matter.
There’s no doubt in my mind that Garibaldi et al.’s paper is interesting and deserved a write-up. But three largely overlapping write-ups over the course of a month after publication? Well, you tell me. I know what I think.
The Safety Deposit Vault
The Backup Copy from Kunnskapsfilm on Vimeo.
You really wanted another video about Svalbard, didn’t you? Of course you did. Check out the whispering seeds at around 6 mins in. Looks like it’s not the whole thing, though. Pity.
Nibbles: Property rights, Dryland crops, New tomato, CGIAR genebanks, Quinoa in US, Wasps and figs, Ancient New World agriculture, Allium CWR, SADC seed law, ESA, Coconut pollination
- Why tenure matters. And why it doesn’t.
- Book on alternative crops for dry areas. Not that alternative, settle down. And anyway, how do they do in mixtures?
- And the award for Best New Variety of the Year goes to…
- CGIAR Consortium hires private sector biotech expert to oversee genebanks et al.
- US set to grow more quinoa. Shame on you, taking the bread out of the mouths of Andean peasants!
- Save our figs!
- Malanga and cassava important on Mayan menu. And maize maybe not so much on Pueblan one as thought.
- New onion wild relative spotted in Central Asia.
- GRAIN objects to new one-size-fits-all SADC seed law.
- Ecological Society of America discovers agriculture.
- Indian institute trains first female coconut pollinators.
Brainfood: Farming systems, Connectivity, Neolithic China, Paleolithic China, Wheat genomes, Litter domestication, Arabian relatives, Pepper composition, GMOs vs agrobiodiversity
- Using biodiversity to link agricultural productivity with environmental quality: Results from three field experiments in Iowa. Diversify any way you can. Even in Iowa.
- Improving conservation planning for semi-natural grasslands: Integrating connectivity into agri-environment schemes. Connect any way you can. Even in Europe.
- Early millet use in northern China. Very early. Starch grains push broomcorn millet use in China back 1,000 years, and foxtail millet 2,000.
- Paleolithic human exploitation of plant foods during the last glacial maximum in North China. And ten thousand years before millets, there were wild grasses, roots, tubers and gourds.
- Draft genome of the wheat A-genome progenitor Triticum urartu. Can be used to find agronomically important genes. But settle down, it’s only one of the 3 wheat genomes, after all.
- Aegilops tauschii draft genome sequence reveals a gene repertoire for wheat adaptation. Not so fast, here comes the D genome too…
- Side-effects of plant domestication: ecosystem impacts of changes in litter quality. Domestication led to higher quality, more easily decomposed litter.
- Crop wild relatives from the Arabian Peninsula. 400 of them.
- Compositional Characterization of Native Peruvian Chili Peppers (Capsicum spp.). There’s much variation, but not that much.
- Feeding the world: genetically modified crops versus agricultural biodiversity. Guess which one is drinking the other’s milkshake. And a similar blast from the past.