- Moroccan almond is a distinct gene pool as revealed by SSR. Ok, now what?
- Molecular markers for late blight resistance breeding of potato: an update. Ok, now what?
- Reconstructing the Maize Market in Rural Mexico. Not so free after all.
- Why agronomy in the developing world has become contentious. Neoliberalism, participation and environmentalism. The answer? Political agronomy.
- Millet and sauce: The uses and functions of querns among the Minyanka (Mali). Form depends on more than just function.
- Landscape pattern and sustainability of a 1300-year-old agricultural landscape in subtropical mountain areas, Southwestern China. If it ain’t broke, why fix it?
- Mathematical optimization ideas for biodiversity conservation. Fancy math works sometimes but not always. Wonder if it would work on the Hani terraces above. Or on Mexican maize for that matter.
- Mitochondrial genome is paternally inherited in Cucumis allotetraploid (C. × hytivus) derived by interspecific hybridization. Not the chlororoplast genome though. Weird. But now what?
- Migrate or evolve: options for plant pathogens under climate change. Or, indeed, both. But we need better models, and a better handle on what human interventions can do. Interestingly, pathogen diversity may well increase in some places.
Brainfood: Farming systems, Connectivity, Neolithic China, Paleolithic China, Wheat genomes, Litter domestication, Arabian relatives, Pepper composition, GMOs vs agrobiodiversity
- Using biodiversity to link agricultural productivity with environmental quality: Results from three field experiments in Iowa. Diversify any way you can. Even in Iowa.
- Improving conservation planning for semi-natural grasslands: Integrating connectivity into agri-environment schemes. Connect any way you can. Even in Europe.
- Early millet use in northern China. Very early. Starch grains push broomcorn millet use in China back 1,000 years, and foxtail millet 2,000.
- Paleolithic human exploitation of plant foods during the last glacial maximum in North China. And ten thousand years before millets, there were wild grasses, roots, tubers and gourds.
- Draft genome of the wheat A-genome progenitor Triticum urartu. Can be used to find agronomically important genes. But settle down, it’s only one of the 3 wheat genomes, after all.
- Aegilops tauschii draft genome sequence reveals a gene repertoire for wheat adaptation. Not so fast, here comes the D genome too…
- Side-effects of plant domestication: ecosystem impacts of changes in litter quality. Domestication led to higher quality, more easily decomposed litter.
- Crop wild relatives from the Arabian Peninsula. 400 of them.
- Compositional Characterization of Native Peruvian Chili Peppers (Capsicum spp.). There’s much variation, but not that much.
- Feeding the world: genetically modified crops versus agricultural biodiversity. Guess which one is drinking the other’s milkshake. And a similar blast from the past.
Brainfood: Perennial wheat, Tree diversity, Fire, Dog domestication, Coffee diversity, Uganda cassava diversity, Sorghum structure, Japanese pastures, Maize diversity, Protection, Pigeonpea hybrid, Wheat nutritional composition, Pollinator diversity, Cajanus gap, Tree diversity, Resilient seed systems
- Perennial cereal crops: An initial evaluation of wheat derivatives. Early days still.
- Effects of silviculture on native tree species richness: interactions between management, landscape context and regional climate. Encourage mosaics, and don’t harvest everything.
- The global fire–productivity relationship. It’s humped, and will be changed by climate change, though for different reasons for different productivity levels. Wonder about the fire-diversity relationship, though.
- Ancient DNA Analysis Affirms the Canid from Altai as a Primitive Dog. Bit of a judgement call though.
- Genetic structure and diversity of coffee (Coffea) across Africa and the Indian Ocean islands revealed using microsatellites. Just what you would expect, given the “morpho-taxonomic species delimitations and genetic units.”
- Genetic diversity among farmer-preferred cassava landraces in Uganda. Landraces only a bit more diverse than elites overall, but half of them quite different.
- Correspondence between genetic structure and farmers’ taxonomy — a case study from dry-season sorghum landraces in northern Cameroon. Genetic units = farmer-recognized landraces.
- Plant diversity, productivity and nutritive value change following abandonment of public pastures in Japan. The best way to restore productivity (diversity doesn’t change much) in abandoned pastures is to start grazing them again.
- Genetic variability of maize stover quality and the potential for genetic improvement of fodder value. You can improve stover and grain yield simultaneously, in hybrids. In theory.
- Governance regime and location influence avoided deforestation success of protected areas in the Brazilian Amazon. Total protection better than sustainable use. Ouch. Meanwhile, in the USA…
- ICPH 2671 – the world’s first commercial food legume hybrid. Yet another milestone on the road to the complete eradication of farmers’ rights.
- Genetic improvement of grain protein content and other health-related constituents of wheat grain. Need to figure out the genetic control mechanisms, and then exploit “alien” germplasm using MAS. Oh, and GMOs too.
- Quantifying the impacts of bioenergy crops on pollinating insect abundance and diversity: a field-scale evaluation reveals taxon-specific responses. Diversity begets diversity.
- Diversity and geographical gaps in Cajanus scarabaeoides (L.) Thou. germplasm conserved at the ICRISAT genebank. Now collectors know exactly where to go.
- Tree species diversity increases fine root productivity through increased soil volume filling. Below-ground complementarity is good for everyone’s roots, presumably good for the community too.
- Making seed systems more resilient to stress. Foster informal innovation, but also information exchange (presumably including of the formal kind).
Brainfood: Flower microbiome, Salt screening, Sustainble fisheries, Pollinator interactions, Wild pollinators, Forest loss, Landraces, Fisheries collapse, Quinoa diversity, Potted plants, Wheat diversity, Goat diversity, Genomics of domestication
- Unexpected Diversity during Community Succession in the Apple Flower Microbiome. Could be important in disease management.
- Plant Tissue Culture: A Useful Measure for the Screening of Salt Tolerance in Plants. But lots of different ways to do it.
- Fisheries: Does catch reflect abundance? Some. But probably not enough. Here’s the industry spin. And the NY Times does a number on it.
- Plant-Pollinator Interactions over 120 Years: Loss of Species, Co-Occurrence and Function. Extinctions and phenological shifts have occurred, but the system has shown resilience. It is unlikely, however, to continue to do so.
- Wild Pollinators Enhance Fruit Set of Crops Regardless of Honey Bee Abundance. Don’t you sometimes wish titles left something to the imagination? NPR breaks it down for ya, but doesn’t add much to the title.
- Continental estimates of forest cover and forest cover changes in the dry ecosystems of Africa between 1990 and 2000. About 20 Mha of forest loss, not 34 Mha. Still too much, though. But how did FAO get it so wrong?
- Robustness and Strategies of Adaptation among Farmer Varieties of African Rice (Oryza glaberrima) and Asian Rice (Oryza sativa) across West Africa. Local varieties can scale out. And should be used in breeding.
- Genetic and life-history changes associated with fisheries-induced population collapse. Phenotypic changes during Eurasian perch Baltic Sea fisheries collapse could be evolution, but when you look at the genetics it looks more like immigration of unadapted interlopers. Which might be bad for recovery.
- Variable activation of immune response by quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa Willd.) prolamins in celiac disease. Quinoa may be gluten-free, but it can still give you grief, and some varieties are far worse than others.
- Social exchange and vegetative propagation: An untold story of British potted plants. It’s artificial selection, Jim, but not as we know it.
- Wheat Cultivar Performance and Stability between No-Till and Conventional Tillage Systems in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. Tested 21 cultivars for performance under late-planted no-till system and — guess what? — performance varied.
- Genetic diversity and structure in Asian native goat analyzed by newly developed SNP markers. They originated in W Asia, and then admixtured (admixed?) in the E to different extents. Yeah, I thought we knew that already too, but scientists gotta make a living.
- A Bountiful Harvest: Genomic Insights into Crop Domestication Phenotypes. The mutations that underpinned domestication came in all kinds of shapes and sizes. Like this one in maize, for example.
Brainfood: Diverse grasslands, More diverse grasslands, Latitudinal meta-gradients, Acacia barcoding, Cryoconserving recalcitrant seeds, Tree tomato, Modeling parasites, Landscape complexity & services, Genomics & breeding
Transgressive overyielding of soil microbial biomass in a grassland plant diversity gradient. Dead link. More microbial biomass in mixtures of plants than in each of the monocultures. Which I guess is a good thing?- Ecosystem function enhanced by combining four functional types of plant species in intensively managed grassland mixtures: a 3-year continental-scale field experiment. That transgression goes for the yield of the plants too. The mixtures were also more resistant to weed invasion.
- Latitudinal gradients as natural laboratories to infer species’ responses to temperature. Meta-analysis shows that many life history traits vary with latitude, but not necessarily with temperature.
- DNA barcoding for conservation, seed banking and ecological restoration of Acacia in the Midwest of Western Australia. Not quite there yet, is it?
- Preservation of Recalcitrant Seeds. We have the technology. Recalcitrance is not an excuse. And may not be as common as advertised anyway.
- Genetic diversity and relationships in accessions from different cultivar groups and origins in the tree tomato (Solanum betaceum Cav.). It is variable. It originated in Ecuador. Even the press release struggles to say much more than that. They should have asked the mother-in-law.
- Metabolic approaches to understanding climate change impacts on seasonal host-macroparasite dynamics. Fortunately, and yet suspiciously, it is easy to estimate the model parameters even when you don’t have much data.
- Flow and stability of natural pest control services depend on complexity and crop rotation at the landscape scale. You need complexity in both space and time to get the most out of your landscapes.
- Improving fruit and wine: what does genomics have to offer? A lot. But you have to be ready for it.