- Impact of landscape alteration and invasions on pollinators: a meta-analysis. Habitat alteration and invasions equally bad on visitation rates, invasive animals more bad than invasive plants, and disturbance of the matrix more than fragment size. But there are some differences among vegetation types.
- The determinants of leaf turgor loss point and prediction of drought tolerance of species and biomes: a global meta-analysis. Osmotic potential at full turgor could be used to predict drought tolerance across species. Cut a long story short, that simplifies down to salty cell sap, give or take. Good for choosing crop wild relatives to use in breeding for drought tolerance?
- Market-based instruments for biodiversity and ecosystem services: A lexicon. If you want to tell your tradable permits from your reverse auctions. And really, who doesn’t?
- Phenotypic and molecular dissection of ICRISAT mini core collection of peanut (Arachis hypogaea L.) for high oleic acid. Much diversity in oleic acid (O) to low linoleic acid (L) ratio found. Breeders alerted.
- Phenotypic diversity and evolution of farmer varieties of bread wheat on organic farms in Europe. There wasn’t much of it, over 3 years.
- A Comparison of Dung Beetle (Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae) Attraction to Native and Exotic Mammal Dung. They really know their shit.
- Small-scale farming in semi-arid areas: Livelihood dynamics between 1997 and 2010 in Laikipia, Kenya. Life continues to be a bitch, there’s no other way to say it. But when will the people who measure livelihoods measure the diversity of people’s assets as well as their size?
- Climate-associated phenological advances in bee pollinators and bee-pollinated plants. About 10 days over the past 130 years, most of the change since 1970, and bee plants keeping pace with bees.
Nibbles: All singing and dancing, FAO meets Big Data, Clone this, Patent nonsense, Frozen fish
- Fisherfolk of the Amazon landed on film. But do they sing about it? (And it’s not just an Amazon thing, this dancing and singing about agrobiodiversity. Not by any means.) And should they be doing more slashing-and-burning?
- FAO to put all its data in one basket. But including AnGR? WIEWS? One asks more in hope than expectation.
- One of the many challenges of vegetatively propagated crops (like potatoes): rapid multiplication. (Well, they could always do an SNP-based tetraploid map of the damn things, couldn’t they.) No such problems with seeds, of course.
- There’s been a rapid increase in the patenting of adaptation-related traits, and the private sector in industrialized countries is mainly responsible. Well there’s a surprise. But was that discussed at the CCAFS meeting on breeding objectives for Africa? And it’s just as well to remember that it’s not just breeding that’s needed. Oh, but by the way, you better grab those adaptations while you can…
- Regional SE Asian fish genebank proposed. That I’d love to see. Maybe they could share germplasm with, I dunno, Chicago? And not just.
Older fruits do it more healthily
Oh, golly, it seems the question I asked in a post a few months back entitled “Is modern plant breeding bad for your health?” may be about to receive an answer…
Ready for safety duplication
West African food composition data by variety
Good news from FAO:
West African Food Composition Table / Table de composition des aliments d’Afrique de l’Ouest is available on the INFOODS website (http://www.fao.org/infoods/tables_africa_en.stm and http://www.fao.org/infoods/tables_africa_fr.stm) as PDF and Excel file. It includes 472 foods and 28 components.
Particularly good because data is provided for different, named varieties, for at least some crops. Here’s a screengrab of part of some of the entries for pearl millet, just to give you an idea:
And yes, in case you were wondering, those ikmv and ikmp numbers refer to genebank accessions, as it happens mainly at ICRISAT and USDA. Just insert “ikmp” in the little box at the top right hand corner of Genesys, for example.
Now, who’s going to send these data to USDA and ICRISAT for them to include in their databases? Wait a minute… Why is everybody looking at me?