- Agriculture and climate change are reshaping insect biodiversity worldwide. Does that mean there won’t be enough of them for us to eat? Well, and to pollinate stuff I guess.
- From science to society: implementing effective strategies to improve wild pollinator health. It’s the indirect drivers that will get them in the end.
- Sustainable protected areas: Synergies between biodiversity conservation and socioeconomic development. Empower communities and management, you fools!
- Tea–vegetable gardens in Longsheng Nationalities Autonomous County: temporal and spatial distribution, agrobiodiversity and social–ecological values. Communities and management were presumably fully empowered.
- WILDMEAT interventions database: A new database of interventions addressing unsustainable wild meat hunting, consumption and trade. Very empowering, I’m sure. Unclear whether edible insects are included though.
- Chorta (Wild Greens) in Central Crete: The Bio-Cultural Heritage of a Hidden and Resilient Ingredient of the Mediterranean Diet. Well, frankly, who needs insects when you have weeds?
- Relative yield of food and efficiency of land-use in organic agriculture – A regional study. If the best bits of Sweden went fully organic, 130% more land would be needed. Unclear whether eating either weeds or insects was factored into the calculations.
- Advancing designer crops for climate resilience through an integrated genomics approach. Forget eating weeds, protecting pollinators and empowering this or that, thrown everything at crop improvement.
- Developing Germplasm and Promoting Consumption of Anthocyanin-Rich Grains for Health Benefits. Especially crops with coloured grains.
- The World Vegetable Center Amaranthus germplasm collection: Core collection development and evaluation of agronomic and nutritional traits. Well, and vegetables, presumably.
- Consumer acceptance of fungus-resistant grape wines: Evidence from Italy, the UK, and the USA. Ah yes, but whether consumers like the idea of grape vines improved through interspecific hybridization depends on what exactly you tell them. So much for empowerment.
- The evolutionary relationship between bere barley and other types of cultivated barley. Unfortunately this paper did not come out in time for the inclusion of a subplot on the introduction of Viking barley to the Orkneys in the current blockbuster The Northman. But I hear there’s stuff in there about empowerment.
Nibbles: Diversification, Heirloom greens, Forgotten fruit, Eat this meat, SPC lab
- We need to diversify the food system.
- Start with collard greens maybe?
- Continue with pawpaws.
- And do something about meat.
- Finally, open a molecular lab.
- Wait, what?
Brainfood: Neodomestication, Millet diets, OFSP, Fruits, Okra core, Floating gardens, Quinoa evaluation, Bean cooking, Neolithic, Lychee genome, Climate change, European maize double
- Scaling up neodomestication for climate-ready crops. Ok, but when is enough enough?
- Can Feeding a Millet-Based Diet Improve the Growth of Children? — A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Yes. So maybe make the most of the crops we already have?
- Does vitamin A rich orange-fleshed sweetpotato adoption improve household level diet diversity? Evidence from Ghana and Nigeria. Sometimes. So maybe make the most of the crops we already have?
- Global interdependence for fruit genetic resources: status and challenges in India. So many crops out there.
- DATASET: The World Vegetable Center okra (Abelmoschus esculentus) core collection as a source for flooding stress tolerance traits for breeding. This is one way of making the most of the crops we already have.
- The floating garden agricultural system of the Inle lake (Myanmar) as an example of equilibrium between food production and biodiversity maintenance. This is another way of making the most of the crops we already have.
- Phenotyping a diversity panel of quinoa using UAV-retrieved leaf area index, SPAD-based chlorophyll and a random forest approach. Oh look, here’s another, and all you need is a drone and fancy maths.
- The Phaseolus vulgaris L. Yellow Bean Collection: genetic diversity and characterization for cooking time. For this one you don’t even need a drone.
- Prehistoric Farming Settlements in Western Anatolia. What, only 5 crops?
- Two divergent haplotypes from a highly heterozygous lychee genome suggest independent domestication events for early and late-maturing cultivars. Ancient farmers knew what they were doing after all, eh?
- Expected global suitability of coffee, cashew and avocado due to climate change. Millennials could be in trouble if new crops don’t come along.
- Traditional Foods From Maize (Zea mays L.) in Europe. Maybe European millennials could eat more maize.
- Growing maize landraces in industrialized countries: from the search for seeds to the emergence of new practices and values. Nah, let’s domesticate something else instead.
Brainfood: CGIAR, Wheat adoption, Durum erosion, Napier grass diversity, Asian trees, Cannabis origins, Potato genome, Somaclonal variation, Sugarcane collections, On farm beans, Crowd-sourced diets, Banana mapping, Medicinal enset, Vitis diversity
- Viewpoint: Aligning vision and reality in publicly funded agricultural research for development: A case study of CGIAR. Some countries and crops are being short-changed.
- Institutional and farm-level challenges limiting the diffusion of new varieties from public and CGIAR centers: The case of wheat in Morocco. No way either Morocco nor wheat are being short-changed, and yet both micro-level and institutional factors are holding back new varieties there.
- Estimation of genetic erosion on Ethiopian tetraploid wheat landraces using different approaches. No such adoption problems in Ethiopia, it seems.
- Insights Into the Genetic Architecture of Complex Traits in Napier Grass (Cenchrus purpureus) and QTL Regions Governing Forage Biomass Yield, Water Use Efficiency and Feed Quality Traits. Napier grass is clearly not being short-changed. I’m sure my MIL would approve.
- Tropical and subtropical Asia’s valued tree species under threat. Not valued enough, though.
- The origin of the genus Cannabis. If CGIAR decides to work on cannabis, Yunnan would be the place to start getting material from.
- Phased, chromosome-scale genome assemblies of tetraploid potato reveals a complex genome, transcriptome, and predicted proteome landscape underpinning genetic diversity. Clonal propagation and limited meiosis has really short-changed the potato, but this work, which includes CGIAR, will really help breeders get rid of accumulated nasty alleles.
- Somaclonal variation in clonal crops: containing the bad, exploring the good. And then there’s somaclonal variation…
- Sugarcane Genetic Diversity and Major Germplasm Collections. Ripe for the above treatment. Followed by take-over by CGIAR.
- On-farm conservation in Phaseolus lunatus L: an alternative for agricultural biodiversity. On farm conservation must not be short-changed.
- Leveraging Digital Tools and Crowdsourcing Approaches to Generate High-Frequency Data for Diet Quality Monitoring at Population Scale in Rwanda. Younger people get short-changed in their diet; but, surprisingly, women do not.
- UAV-Based Mapping of Banana Land Area for Village-Level Decision-Support in Rwanda. Can’t help thinking we’re being short-changed by not mashing this up with the above somehow.
- The Genetic Diversity of Enset (Ensete ventricosum) Landraces Used in Traditional Medicine Is Similar to the Diversity Found in Non-medicinal Landraces. The title short-changes the casual reader. Medicinal varieties are in fact different from non-medicinal varieties, but do not cluster together. Mapping from space next?
- Phenological diversity in wild and hybrid grapes (Vitis) from the USDA-ARS cold-hardy grape collection. No sign of short-changing grapevine, at least in the US, resulting in some interesting opportunities for its expansion into new areas using wild relatives.
Nibbles: Seed saving edition
- Seed saving in The Guardian.
- Seed saving in Nigeria.
- More seed saving needed in Zimbabwe.
- Save seeds instead of growing GMO crops? The “debate” continues…
- Is seed saving among the best-bet government interventions to fix our diets? Find out.
- Seed saving on rsmag.com, whatever that is.
- Will the new Oxford nature recovery centre look into seed saving, I wonder?
- Saving baobab seeds in Burkina Faso.
- We need joined-up food system thinking. Starting with seed saving?