- The Broad Spectrum Species: Plant Use and Processing as Deep Time Adaptations. Hundreds of plant species, many now forgotten, show up in archaeological assemblages stretching back tens of thousands of years. Exploiting an astonishing diversity of plants was a fundamental human adaptation long before agriculture. And the data was kinda always there.
- Evaluating cultivars for pollinator gardens. Some ornamental cultivars attract more pollinators than the wild plants they were bred from. The relationship between genetic modification through breeding and ecological function is not always straightforward. And I now want to see the descriptor “pollinator attractiveness” in evaluation datasets.
- Chemotypic Diversity and Integrated Metabolic Profiling of Myrtle (Myrtus communis L.) from Mediterranean Turkey. Dozens of different chemical compounds vary dramatically among individual myrtle plants that look much the same to the naked eye.
- Essential oil composition and ethnobotanical survey of male and female Juniperus seravschanica Kom. (Cupressaceae) in Iran. Traditional knowledge and chemical profiling show that juniper male shoots, female shoots and cones each produce distinct blends of essential oils, exposing a surprising layer of sex-linked diversity within a single species.
- Earth Metabolome and Digital Botanical Gardens Initiatives: Chemodiversity Knowledge for Biodiversity Conservation. Millions of plant-produced molecules remain undocumented, forming an invisible dimension of biodiversity. We need global digital infrastructures to catalogue this vast reservoir of chemodiversity before it disappears. Of course we do.
- Herbaria Provide a Valuable Resource for Obtaining Informative mRNA. Decades-old herbarium specimens still contain usable messenger RNA, opening the door to studying historical patterns of gene expression from preserved plant collections.
- The Politics of Open Infrastructures: Power, Governance, and Justice in Digital Knowledge Practices. Data infrastructures may be open, but control over them often is not. And that probably goes even more for the unusual sorts of data represented by the above papers than for the crop diversity data we normally deal with here.
Brainfood: Diversity of Oats, Cotton, Sugarcane, Rice, Amaranthus, Vegetables, Agroforestry, Value chains
- Genome-wide comparative diversity uncovers population structure, global distribution, and targets of selection in hexaploid oat. A worldwide survey reveals how oat diversity is structured, spread, and shaped by breeding, helping pinpoint untapped genetic resources for future improvement.
- Genomic diversity and the domestication history of cotton (Gossypium hirsutum). Its genome traces cotton’s journey from its wild origins in Mesoamerica while documenting the genetic narrowing that accompanied domestication.
- Genetic architecture of sugarcane traits in a polyploid genomics framework. New genomic tools finally begin to untangle the diversity of one of agriculture’s most genetically complex crops, exposing the basis of traits breeders have long selected largely in the dark.
- Projected warming will exceed the long-term thermal limits of rice cultivation. Rice has historically thrived within remarkably stable climatic boundaries. Those boundaries are now on course to be crossed across major growing regions, with profound implications for global food security. Diversity to the rescue?
- An inter-specific Amaranthus pangenome captures genetic variation potentially underlying key leafy vegetable traits in this underutilised crop. A rich reservoir of previously hidden diversity emerges from across multiple cultivated amaranths, offering breeders new options for improving a neglected but nutritious vegetable.
- Impact of gardening and nutrition support provided to women in refugee camps in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. Even in one of the world’s most challenging humanitarian settings, greater interspecific crop diversity translated into better diets, improved food security, and enhanced wellbeing.
- Designing perennial crop-based agroforestry systems: specificities, challenges, and opportunities. Diversification does not stop at the field edge: how perennial crops can be combined with trees to deliver productive, resilient, and biodiversity-friendly farming systems.
- Towards Nature Positive supply chains: From biodiversity commitments to organisational action. What would it take to move biodiversity from corporate promises to business practice? Maybe the above examples can help turn aspiration into measurable action.
Brainfood: Markets edition
- “What is the essence of cultivating a crop that does not yield enough to feed my family?” Farmer agency and the management of agrobiodiversity in Ghana and Burkina Faso. Farmers balance subsistence needs and market opportunities when deciding which crop varieties to maintain. Well I never.
- Reassessing the economic returns of diverse traditional agricultural systems for smallholder farmers: a case study of the milpa in Mexico. Diverse traditional farming systems can generate significant economic value; so no, agricultural diversity is not necessarily less profitable than specialization for market production.
- Farmer participatory evaluation of Amaranthus cruentus L. breeding lines for marketable vegetable yield and organoleptic quality under on-farm and on-station conditions. In any case, farmers can work with researchers to select amaranth varieties with traits that improve both marketability and consumer appeal, linking crop improvement directly to market demand.
- Novel soybean type with improved volatile and sensory characteristics of raw soy slurries. Breeding soybean varieties with enhanced sensory qualities can hopefully increase consumer acceptance and create new market opportunities for soy-based foods. Unclear if farmers were involved, but they could have been..
- Can the digital long tail effect in farmers’ markets increase crop diversity on farms and in diets? Yes. Digital platforms can connect niche producers and consumers, creating markets for a wider range of crops, thereby encouraging agricultural and dietary diversity. How about linking seed producers to farmers?
- Preserving crop genetic diversity through traditional seed systems: insights from farmer-saved fonio (Digitaria exilis) landraces in Northern Ghana. Farmer-managed seed systems support the conservation of crop diversity while maintaining access to locally adapted varieties with potential market value. But maybe they could use a digital platform?
- Seeds and social norms: sorghum seed exchange among smallholder farmers in Northern Ethiopia. Cultural practices shape how farmers share seeds, influencing the circulation of crop diversity and farmers’ participation in local seed markets. Good luck with those digital platforms.
Brainfood: Indigenous edition
- Rapid adaptive increase of amylase gene copy number in Indigenous Andeans. Indigenous Andean populations evolved exceptionally high copy numbers of the AMY1 salivary amylase gene, likely linked to long-term adaptation to starch-rich diets associated with potato domestication roughly 10,000 years ago.
- Horse genetics, archaeology, and the beginning of riding. Horse domestication was not a sudden genetic event beginning around 2200–2100 BCE, but a long and regionally varied process in which Indigenous Eurasian pastoralists progressively managed, rode, milked and selectively bred multiple horse lineages over many centuries, transforming mobility and social organization well before the rise of the dominant modern domestic horse lineage.
- Bridging biodiversity and food systems: A nationwide synthesis of non-conventional food plants (PANCs) in Brazil. Brazil’s non-conventional food plants (PANCs) and associated Indigenous and traditional knowledge could help build more diverse, climate-resilient and socially inclusive food systems while strengthening biodiversity conservation, rural livelihoods and public food programs.
- Indigenous Wisdom for a Changing World: Bridging Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Biodiversity Conservation. Sacred groves and other community-managed landscapes in central Ethiopia conserve high levels of biodiversity through Indigenous institutions, ritual practices and traditional ecological knowledge, suggesting that effective conservation depends on treating cultural stewardship systems as integral to ecological resilience rather than as secondary to scientific management.
- When Knowledge Isn’t Free: Legal and Ethical Imperatives of Protecting Indigenous Intellectual Property. There’s a persistent mismatch between Western intellectual-property regimes and Indigenous concepts of collective ownership, biocultural heritage and intergenerational custodianship of knowledge, and that’s unfair.
- Crediting and citing Indigenous Knowledges within research. Biodiversity conservation becomes more effective when Indigenous scientists and communities participate as equal partners rather than merely as local stakeholders or informants.
Brainfood: Spatial data edition
- The ClimSat classification system—a global climate classification map based on long-term satellite-derived data. There’s a new global climate classification system in town, and it’s better ecologically than Köppen’s.
- The first global agricultural field boundary map at 10 m resolution. Combined with the above, we can now characterize the climate of every agricultural field in the world.
- GEM-Forest: A Global satellite EMbedding–based map of forests and tree crops for 2020. Do any of those fields have tree crops? And how far is the forest?
- Global annual cropland dynamics 2015–2024. The next time we map agricultural field boundaries, there will probably be more of them.
- Climate-induced range shifts support local plant diversity but don’t reduce extinction risk. Those new agricultural fields will be bad for wild plants.
- ‘SiteTool’: a ‘Shiny’ application for field site selection and evaluation. Cool new tool helps you select geographical sites based on ecological characteristics. Could be used to help decide where to collect or evaluate germplasm. Lots of opportunities for combining with some of the above, I suspect.
- Current and future potential of cassava (Manihot esculenta) in Southern Africa: a scoping review. An example of what you can do when you combine different types of spatial (and other data). The area suitable for cassava in Africa will increase, and there’s lots of scope for higher yields too. If we can combine datasets, soon we’ll know which specific fields to grow it in, for higher production, to protect wild biodiversity…
- Global and regional climate modes modulate armed conflict risk. …and to mitigate the risk of conflict.