- Systematic, large-scale national biodiversity surveys: NeoMaps as a model for tropical regions. The Neotropical Biodiversity Mapping Initiative (NeoMaps) provides good estimates of species richness, composition and relative abundance, in about 1 month of fieldwork per major taxonomic group and about US$ 1–8 per sq km. Now to do something similar for crop diversity.
- Insights into potato innovation systems in Bolivia, Ethiopia, Peru and Uganda. Rapid appraisal of potato innovation system by CIP et al. reveals differences among countries, but significant role of CIP across countries. Roles of farmer organizations and input supply companies limited everywhere.
- Population genetic structure of in situ wild Sorghum bicolor in its Ethiopian center of origin based on SSR markers. Significant differentiation among populations, despite long-distance seed movement and introgression.
- Assessing declines of North American bumble bees (Bombus spp.) using museum specimens. Half of the species are declining.
- Is naked barley an eastern or a western crop? The combined evidence of archaeobotany and genetics. Well, it used to be western too, up to the Bronze Age. Now mainly eastern.
- Crop protection and conflict mitigation: reducing the costs of living alongside non-human primates. A diversity of strategies for coping with malevolent biodiversity.
- Conserving biodiversity in a changing world: land use change and species richness in northern Tanzania. But, would you know it, pastoral grazing threatens other mammals.
- Mapping from heterogeneous biodiversity monitoring data sources. Could be interesting when folks get around to mapping agricultural biodiversity by smart phone.
- Sustainable management of planted landscapes: lessons from Japan. They planted trees, then neglected them because imports were cheaper, and now they’re paying some kind of price.
- Aquaculture: a newly emergent food production sector—and perspectives of its impacts on biodiversity and conservation. Mixed …
- Protection strategies for farmland birds in legume–grass leys as trade-offs between nature conservation and farmers’ needs. Cut high for succesful skylark nests with minimal impact on milk.
- Optimizing lentil-based mixed cropping with different companion crops and plant densities in terms of crop yield and weed control. Mixtures might be better, especially with wheat and barley.
- Role of eucalypt and other planted forests in biodiversity conservation and the provision of biodiversity-related ecosystem services. They can provide an opportunity for forest restoration, but it will take some rethinking. The mother-in-law will be pleased.
- Influence of Sources of Seed on Varietal Adoption Behavior of Wheat Farmers in Indo-Gangetic Plains of India. You need to get the message out if you want your improved varieties adopted. Can’t imagine you’d need a multinomial logit model to figure that out.
- Pastoral nomadism in the forest-steppe of the Mongolian Altai under a changing economy and a warming climate. As transport costs go up, and goat numbers increase because of cash from cashmere, mobility decreases and overgrazing results. A traditional way of life becoming unsustainable before your eyes.
- Species-rich dung beetle communities buffer ecosystem services in perturbed agro-ecosystems. Functional redundancy is not redundant after all.
Brainfood: Resistances, Seed networks, Medicinal plant protection, Pollinator knowledge gaps
- Indirect Effect of a Transgenic Wheat on Aphids through Enhanced Powdery Mildew Resistance. Plants resistant to fungus have more aphids. Oh dear.
- A case study of seed exchange networks and gene flow for barley (Hordeum vulgare subsp. vulgare) in Morocco. There is more movement of material among villages than interviews suggest.
- Evaluation of plant-derived products against pests and diseases of medicinal plants: A review. Extracts from some medicinal plants used to protect other medicinal plants.
- Identifying key knowledge needs for evidence-based conservation of wild insect pollinators: a collaborative cross-sectoral exercise. Top one: How important is the diversity of pollinator species to the resilience and reliability of the pollination service? Seems a pretty good start.
Brainfood: Host-pathogen genomics, Maize-teosinte system, Organic Europe meta-analysis, Food perceptions, Guanaco, Earthworms, Pea & powdery mildew, Pea drought tolerance, Butternut regeneration, Wild tomato salt tolerance, Germination & climate change, Medieval melons, Barley domestication, Rice origin, Livestock & wildlife, Niche modelling, Insects
- A Population Genomics Perspective on the Emergence and Adaptation of New Plant Pathogens in Agro-Ecosystems. Crop diversity affects fungal diversity as much as the other way around. Actually more so, as fungal genomes are incredibly plastic.
- Teosinte as a model system for population and ecological genomics. Genetics of speciation, hybridization, various evolutionary questions: all can usefully be looked at in the maize-teosinte system with cheap next-generation sequencing. Oh, and that can help us with crop improvement.
- Does organic farming reduce environmental impacts? –- A meta-analysis of European research. Per unit area, yes. Per unit product, not always. Need to mix and match. Good luck with that.
- “Healthy,” “diet,” or “hedonic”. How nutrition claims affect food-related perceptions and intake? If you tell people something is healthier, they believe it is, in fact, well, healthier.
- Guanaco management by pastoralists in the Southern Andes. They can coexist with cattle.
- Earthworms promote the reduction of Fusarium biomass and deoxynivalenol content in wheat straw under field conditions. Earthworms protect crops from pathogens.
- Screening of pea germplasm for resistance to powdery mildew. 14 accessions from 10 countries are promising. That’s out of 700. Hard row to hoe.
- Sources of high tolerance to salinity in pea (Pisum sativum L.). Out of some 780 accessions, China seems to be a hotspot, but the most tolerant accession was from Greece. Any overlap with the previous results?
- A rare case of natural regeneration in butternut, a threatened forest tree, is parent and space limited. In situ is not enough. Not if you don’t help it along, anyway.
- Relationship between survival and yield related traits in Solanum pimpinellifolium under salt stress. 2 accessions among a subset of over 90 from over 300 in the AVRDC collection show high survival and yield under stress. Would be interesting to know if the 90 were indeed well-chosen in the first place.
- Climate warming could shift the timing of seed germination in alpine plants. Spring emergence will shift to autumn, but the bad effect will be on the seedlings.
- Medieval emergence of sweet melons, Cucumis melo (Cucurbitaceae). Lexicography suggests that there were sweet melons in Central Asia early on, but they didn’t get to Iberia until the late 11th Century, and to the rest of Europe until the 15th. Climate and the clash of civilizations to blame, as ever.
- Tibet is one of the centers of domestication of cultivated barley. The other being the Fertile Crescent. Some Chinese hulless and six-rowed barleys in particular are similar to Tibetan wild material. But are the authors stretching the data?
- A map of rice genome variation reveals the origin of cultivated rice. Or origins. Japonica first domesticated from O. rufipogon in the middle Pearl River in Southern China, and indica is a hybrid of the first cultivars with local wild rice in South East and South Asia. But have we not heard this before? Ah, but this paper has more, better markers, no doubt. Anyway, compare and contrast with maize and barley above.
- Lessons on the relationship between livestock husbandry and biodiversity from the Kenya Long-term Exclosure Experiment (KLEE). Livestock and wildlife can coexist, but you have to work at it. Bit like the guanaco thing, then?
- Modeling plant species distributions under future climates: how fine-scale do climate projections need to be? Doesn’t matter for total extent, but actual locations of stable climates vary with scale. On average, “270 m is fine enough,” but it really depends on the species. Probably safest answer is “as fine as possible.”
- Fertilisers and insect herbivores: a meta-analysis. Fertilizers good for insect numbers. Which means bad for plants? But insect diversity? Wonder what they do to those earthworms and fungi above…
Brainfood: Wild barley drought tolerance, GM cassava retraction, Lupinus ploidy, Diversity levels
- SSR analysis of introgression of drought tolerance from the genome of Hordeum spontaneum into cultivated barley (Hordeum vulgare ssp vulgare). Scary thing is that only two wild accessions are involved.
- Transgenic Biofortification of the Starchy Staple Cassava (Manihot esculenta) Generates a Novel Sink for Protein. Fancy biotech puts more of a substance in cassava that nobody eats cassava for. No, wait.
- Whole genome duplication in a threatened grassland plant and the efficacy of seed transfer zones. Mixing of seed from different populations can be a good idea for conservation of rare plants, but not when they also differ in ploidy.
- Genetic diversity in widespread species is not congruent with species richness in alpine plant communities. Cannot use one as a proxy for the other.
Brainfood: Organic ag, Garlic conservation costs, Spelt malting, Wild rice genetics, Diversity and ecosystem function, Old late blight, Urbanization and biodiversity, Seed laws, DNA from herbaria, Fruit & veg & school, Quinoa bars, Maize introgression
- Organic vegetable farms are not nutritionally disadvantaged compared with adjacent conventional or integrated vegetable farms in Eastern Australia. Something for the next meta-analysis.
- Comparing costs for different conservation strategies of garlic (Allium sativum L.) germplasm in genebanks. It depends.
- Malting process optimization of spelt (Triticum spelta L.) for the brewing process. You can make a decent beer from spelt. Can I do the evaluation?
- Genetic differentiation of Oryza ruffipogon [sic] Griff. from Hainan Island and Guangdong, China Based on Hd1 and Ehd1 genes. It’s different, because of different ecology.
- Plant species diversity and genetic diversity within a dominant species interactively affect plant community biomass. In other words, the higher the genetic diversity within the dominant species, the further the effect of species diversity on biomass goes from negative to positive. Bottom line is that you have to consider multiple diversity levels in relating biodiversity to ecosystem functioning. At least in this ecosystem.
- Evidence for presence of the founder Ia mtDNA haplotype of Phytophthora infestans in 19th century potato tubers from the Rothamsted archives. “…the founder Ia mtDNA haplotype survived in potato tubers after 1846 and was present over 30 years later in the UK.”
- Global forecasts of urban expansion to 2030 and direct impacts on biodiversity and carbon pools. Urban area to triple, affecting important biodiversity hotspots. Biggest surprise to me was Turkey. Gotta be a lot of CWRs there that are going to be threatened by urbanization. But I guess this is good news for urban agriculture?
- Seed Governance at the Intersection of Multiple Global and Nation-State Priorities: Modernizing Seeds in Turkey. Developing countries are opting for laws that favor commercialization and privatization because they’re buying into the currently dominant paradigm of what agricultural development means. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t. And if my aunt had wheels she’d be a bus.
- DNA Damage in Plant Herbarium Tissue. There isn’t enough of it to matter.
- Systematic review and meta-analysis of school-based interventions to improve daily fruit and vegetable intake in children aged 5 to 12 y. Fruit yes, veggies no.
- Use of cereal bars with quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa W.) to reduce risk factors related to cardiovascular diseases. Only 22 young(ish) subjects, but promising.
- The Genomic Signature of Crop-Wild Introgression in Maize. The wild relative has helped the cultigen to adapt to highland Mexico.