- Foods and fads: The welfare impacts of rising quinoa prices in Peru. Modest.
- Measuring the Affordability of Nutritious Diets in Africa: Price Indexes for Diet Diversity and the Cost of Nutrient Adequacy. Maybe they could try quinoa.
- Impacts of climate warming on terrestrial ectotherms across latitude. Insects are in trouble in the tropics, but will make up for it at higher latitudes, which will be really bad for crops there, 10-25% more bad.
- Evidence that organic farming promotes pest control. Something for farmers in those higher latitudes to think about.
- The global distribution of Bacillus anthracis and associated anthrax risk to humans, livestock, and wildlife. 63.8 million rural poor livestock keepers are at risk. No word on effect of climate change.
- Do open-pollinated maize varieties perform better than hybrids in agroforestry systems? Maybe in Rwanda, but in Ethiopia not so much.
- More than Yield: Ecosystem Services of Traditional versus Modern Crop Varieties Revisited. Landraces are liked for yield stability in marginal environments, and for cultural reasons.
- Root and shoot traits in parental, early and late generation Green Revolution wheats (Triticum spp.) under glasshouse conditions. Modern wheat have smaller roots.
- Standardized reporting of the costs of management interventions for biodiversity conservation. Behind a paywall, so can’t tell whether includes genebanks. But I bet it doesn’t. Tell me I’m wrong.
- Global assessment of agricultural system redesign for sustainable intensification. Apparently 30% of farms and 10% of agricultural land worldwide, which is both more and less than I would have guessed.
- Genetic homogeneity of North-African goats. The Berber breeds are different, everything else is a big mixed up mess.
- Plant domestication decreases both constitutive and induced chemical defences by direct selection against defensive traits. In cabbage, even the tissues that are not eaten are more edible than in the wild relative.
- Polyploid plants have faster rates of multivariate climatic niche evolution than their diploid relatives. Relevant for domestication?
- An Initiative for the Study and Use of Genetic Diversity of Domesticated Plants and Their Wild Relatives. In Mexico.
- Population structure, relatedness and ploidy levels in an apple gene bank revealed through genotyping-by-sequencing. There’s a lot of inter-relatedness in the Danish collection.
- Biases induced by using geography and environment to guide ex situ conservation. “Although geographic and environmental diversity have proven to be reliable predictors of allele frequency differences and ecotypic differentiation across species ranges, they appear to be poor predictors of allelic diversity per se.” At least for 3 species.
- Examining the spectra of herbarium uses and users. Herbaria mostly used by taxonomists shock.
- Ancient herders enriched and restructured African grasslands. Shit. You heard me.
Down to seeds and stems
Speaking of cool threads, there’s also this from the indefatigable Megan Lynch from the annual meeting of the National Association of Plant Breeders, on a crop that’s responsible for the livelihoods of increasing numbers of people in places like California, and some people think for civilization itself.
Brainfood: Ecology of domestication, Citizen soybeans, Silkworm domestication, Barley spread, Indigenous management, Maize domestication, Temperate maize, Nutrient yields, Amazon history double, Women & diets, Online classification, Charred breadcrumbs, Wheat drought
- Crop domestication: anthropogenic effects on insect–plant interactions in agroecosystems. Domestication can upset trophic webs. Poor dears.
- The soybean experiment ‘1000 Gardens’: a case study of citizen science for research, education, and beyond. 2492 gardens, in fact.
- The evolutionary road from wild moth to domestic silkworm. Domestication in China, followed by multiple independent spreads and differentiation.
- Barley heads east: Genetic analyses reveal routes of spread through diverse Eurasian landscapes. 3 taxa, 8 genepools, multiple routes for spread. A bit like silkworm but in the opposite direction.
- A spatial overview of the global importance of Indigenous lands for conservation. 40% of all terrestrial protected areas.
- Maize domestication and gene interaction. More than just the headline 5 genes.
- Hallauer’s Tusón: a decade of selection for tropical-to-temperate phenological adaptation in maize. Need to go back to tropical germplasm for adaptation to temperate conditions.
- Moving beyond calories and protein: Micronutrient assessment of UK diets and land use. Roots, tubers and vegetables are the most land-efficient producers of 23 nutrients.
- The legacy of 4,500 years of polyculture agroforestry in the eastern Amazon. It is still with us.
- Direct archaeological evidence for Southwestern Amazonia as an early plant domestication and food production centre. And not just in the east.
- Does women’s time in domestic work and agriculture affect women’s and children’s dietary diversity? Evidence from Bangladesh, Nepal, Cambodia, Ghana, and Mozambique. Yes, but varies with socioeconomic status.
- Remap: An online remote sensing application for land cover classification and monitoring. Use your training set to detect habitat type(s) in Google Earth.
- Archaeobotanical evidence reveals the origins of bread 14,400 years ago in northeastern Jordan. Before domestication.
- Drought tolerance during reproductive development is important for increasing wheat yield potential under climate change in Europe. The good news is that germplasm close to the optimized ideotype for 2050 is already out there.
Nibbles: Carrot breeding, BIEN, Protected areas databases, Brazilian genebanks, Endangered coconut genebank, DSI, ABS, Climate pix, Botanical pix double, Potatoes galore, Pandanus language, Archaeological double, Palestinian seed saving
- Putting the polyacetylene back into carrots.
- The Botanical Information and Ecology Network gets an upgrade. Any CWRs among its 18,844,855 more observations?
- And any is protected areas? This will tell how well they’re managed. Mash up with this spatial database on indigenous lands?
- Otherwise, there are genebanks, though not enough in Brazil, apparently.
- And not always safe.
- What to do with Digital Sequence Information? Would be nice to be clear on what it is.
- ABS broken down by ISF. And the CGIAR. Not DSI though.
- Need climate visuals? Well, who doesn’t.
- The Columbian Exchange has visuals also.
- And the Royal Horticultural Society too.
- Speaking of Columbian Exchange: frites. And Vavilov, chefs, etc.
- Speaking about nuts in PNG. Comment by Jim Croft, who would know: “Except the species illustrated is the widespread oceanic strand species, Pandanus tectorius, not the endemic highland crop ‘karuka’, Pandanus julianettii.”
- 5000-year-old brewery in Egypt.
- 14,000-year-old bread.
- Fast forward 14,000 years.
Brainfood: Community forests, Pepper CWR, Banana spread, Blight plasticity, VIR wheat
- Research frontiers in community forest management. Trends are for hybrid business models, REDD+ interactions and the use of secondary data.
- Production of embryo rescued hybrids between the landrace “Friariello” (Capsicum annuum var. annuum) and C. baccatum var. pendulum: phenotypic and cytological characterization. Another crop wild relative enters the arena.
- Earliest Musa banana from the late Quaternary sequence at Fahien Rock Shelter in Sri Lanka. People used wild bananas for 40,000 years before domesticated triplods arrived 6000 years ago.
- Gene expression polymorphism underpins evasion of host immunity in an asexual lineage of the Irish potato famine pathogen. “…17 genes are not expressed in one of the two…isolates despite apparent absence of sequence polymorphisms.”
- Novel sources of resistance to Septoria nodorum blotch in the Vavilov wheat collection identified by genome-wide association studies. The collection that keeps on giving.