- Scientific Selection – A Century of Increasing Crop Varietal Diversity in US Wheat. Whether you take into account the genetic relationship among varieties or not, breeding has been driving up wheat diversity in American fields. But anyone else think this is a bit of a straw man?
- Novel GBS-Based SNP Markers for Finger Millet and Their Use in Genetic Diversity Analyses. The Zimbabwean and Ethiopian landraces are different and should be crossed more to inject some diversity into improved varieties. You mean like they did for wheat in the US?
- On-Farm Diversity of Enset (Ensete ventricosum (Welw.) Cheesman) Landraces, Use, and the Associated Indigenous Knowledge in Adola Rede District, Guji Zone, Oromia, Ethiopia. No problem with diversity in enset, at least morphologically speaking.
- Food and Power in Early Medieval England: a lack of (isotopic) enrichment. Elite “Anglo-Saxon” males did not have a diet that was consistently higher in meat than anyone else at the time, so there. I wonder if any ever ate enset.
- Assessment of agrobiodiversity in the intensive agriculture: a case study of the Indo-Gangetic Plains of India. Could do with some more legumes.
- Community-based rangeland management in Namibia improves resource governance but not environmental and economic outcomes. Market incentives do not always work the way you think.
- The palm trees choose the places – Popular knowledge associated with the use and conservation of butiá (Butia spp.). No word on market incentives.
- Shoot tip cryotherapy for plant pathogen eradication. Especially good if combined with thermotherapy or chemotherapy. May even work on enset, for all I know.
- The phytoplasma associated with Bogia coconut syndrome in Papua New Guinea is a new phytoplasma in the group of the lethal yellowing syndromes (LYTS) of coconut and other palms. Yeah but will cryotherapy work?
- Implementation of species distribution models in Google Earth Engine. Shhh, or everyone will want to do it, and then where will we be.
- Genetic Diversity and Population Structure of Moroccan Beni Ahsen: Is This Endangered Ovine Breed One of the Ancestors of Merino? Maybe? Partly? Does it matter?
Brainfood: Organic ag, Food systems, Seed systems, Breeding for value, Breeding for intercropping, Breeding for cider, Breeding with CWR, Breeding with imaging, Breeding with modelling, Ag & the state
- Impact of large-scale, government legislated and funded organic farming training on pesticide use in Andhra Pradesh, India: a cross-sectional study. Training was not enough.
- Australian local government policies on creating a healthy, sustainable, and equitable food system: analysis in New South Wales and Victoria. Local governments are not doing enough.
- Impact of seed system interventions on food and nutrition security in low- and middle-income countries: A scoping review. Seems like Indian organic farming and Australian local governments should have tried seed system interventions.
- Market Intelligence and Incentive-Based Trait Ranking for Plant Breeding: A Sweetpotato Pilot in Uganda. Breeders need to figure out what farmers value.
- Plant Breeding for Intercropping in Temperate Field Crop Systems: A Review. Breeders need to look at context.
- Meta-analysis of apple (Malus × domestica Borkh.) fruit and juice quality traits for potential use in hard cider production. Breeders need to watch out for plasticity.
- Progenitor species hold untapped diversity for potential climate-responsive traits for use in wheat breeding and crop improvement. Breeders need to sequence crop wild relatives.
- The Use of Near-Infrared Imaging (NIR) as a Fast Non-Destructive Screening Tool to Identify Drought-Tolerant Wheat Genotypes. Breeders need fancy phenotyping.
- Coupling genetic structure analysis and ecological-niche modeling in Kersting’s groundnut in West Africa. Breeders need ecological niche modelling.
- The Origin of the State: Land Productivity or Appropriability? The state didn’t need breeders.
Brainfood: Ultra-processed food, Micronutrients, Wheat breeding, Bambara groundnut breeding, Seed longevity, Sheep diversity, Switchgrass ploidy, Seed services, Jersey in Africa, Wine history, Austronesian dispersal
- Ultra-processed foods should be central to global food systems dialogue and action on biodiversity. Should.
- Global plant diversity as a reservoir of micronutrients for humanity. As.
- Mainstreaming grain zinc and iron concentrations in CIMMYT wheat germplasm. Eventually.
- Utilization of Plant Genetic Resources of Bambara Groundnut Conserved Ex Situ and Genetic Diversification of Its Primary Genepool for Semi-Arid Production. Insufficient.
- More on seed longevity phenotyping. p50.
- Gender dynamics around introduction of improved forages in Kenya and Ethiopia. Training.
- Whole-Genome Resequencing of Worldwide Wild and Domestic Sheep Elucidates Genetic Diversity, Introgression, and Agronomically Important Loci. Hairy.
- Jersey cattle in Africa: From the Breed’s Documented Past to a Profit IndexLinked Future. Promising?
- A generalist–specialist trade-off between switchgrass cytotypes impacts climate adaptation and geographic range. Polyploidy!
- Decentralized Seed Services in Africa. Quality.
- The Rise of Wine among Ancient Civilizations across the Mediterranean Basin. Ritual.
- Genome Analysis Traces Regional Dispersal of Rice in Taiwan and Southeast Asia. Ok, I give up, I can’t do this. Austronesian speakers did not spread out of Taiwan because of rice. If you can summarize that in a word, I’m impressed, so let me know.
Brainfood: Digitizing collections, Bean core, Livestock diversity, Maya & maize, Fish stocks & CC, Save the weed, Flax CWR, Italian agrobiodiversity
- Cross-validation of a semantic segmentation network for natural history collection specimens. Computers can distinguish the herbarium label from the actual specimen and other stuff on the sheet, helping with the whole automatic digitization thing, but it takes some really fancy math.
- The landscapes of livestock diversity: grazing local breeds as a proxy for domesticated species adaptation to the environment. Medium fancy math used to map breed diversity in the Iberian Peninsula for different livestock species and relate it to environmental factors.
- South-to-north migration preceded the advent of intensive farming in the Maya region. Sort of like tomato, but in the other direction. Plenty of math involved, but behind the scenes, thankfully.
- Timing and magnitude of climate-driven range shifts in transboundary fish stocks challenge their management. Huge amount of data and very fancy math shows fish are in trouble.
- A Core Set of Snap Bean Genotypes Established by Phenotyping a Large Panel Collected in Europe. Ok, even I can follow the math on this one.
- Assessment of biogeographic variation in traits of Lewis flax (Linum lewisii) for use in restoration and agriculture. Very approachable math shows which populations of a CWR can best be used for restoration, and where; and also for domestication and breeding.
- An updated checklist of plant agrobiodiversity of northern Italy. Very useful use of very basic maths. Key number: only 43% of the PGR on the list are conserved ex situ.
- Cannabis, the multibillion dollar plant that no genebank wanted. No math needed to figure out weed needs a genebank.
Brainfood: Kungas, Tomato domestication, Wild honeybees, Association mapping, Mixtures, Wild edible plants, DSI ABS, Fusarium wilt, Mango weeds, Conservation payments
- The genetic identity of the earliest human-made hybrid animals, the kungas of Syro-Mesopotamia. According to 4500 year old DNA, these super-donkeys were sterile crosses between female domestic donkeys and wild male asses. I guarantee nothing below will be as much fun as this.
- Haplotype analyses reveal novel insights into tomato history and domestication driven by long-distance migrations and latitudinal adaptations. I was wrong. Turns out tomatoes came about by one wild species evolving into a semi-domesticated one during a gradual migration from the Peruvian deserts to the Mexican rainforests and that fully domesticated Peruvian and Ecuadorian populations were the result of more recent back-migrations.
- Semi-natural habitats promote winter survival of wild-living honeybees in an agricultural landscape. Wrong again. Rare wild honeybees have been found in Galician power poles.
- High-resolution association mapping with libraries of immortalized lines from ancestral landraces. Actually, immortal landraces sound pretty cool too.
- From cultivar mixtures to allelic mixtures: opposite effects of allelic richness between genotypes and genotype richness in wheat. Mixtures of inbred lines are generally better than pure stands for coping with blotch disease, but sometimes specific allelic combinations undermine this. Well, ancient super-donkeys it ain’t, but still.
- Local communities’ perceptions of wild edible plant and mushroom change: A systematic review. The literature shows that local people are worried about the decreased abundance of the wild plants they rely on for food and nutrition security.
- Weeds Enhance Pollinator Diversity and Fruit Yield in Mango. That should be “weeds.” They’re not weeds if they’re actually useful. Maybe some of them are even edible.
- Multilateral benefit-sharing from digital sequence information will support both science and biodiversity conservation. We need a multilateral DSI benefit-sharing system which decouples access to DSI from sharing the benefits of DSI use. Where have I heard that before? And can I hear more about ancient hybrid super-donkeys instead?
- Diversity of Fusarium associated banana wilt in northern Viet Nam. The dreaded TR4 is still rare, but the pathogen lurks among the wild species too.
- Payments for Conservation of Animal Genetic Resources in Agriculture: One Size Fits All? I wonder what size would fit a hybrid super-donkey.