- Exploring Convivial Conservation in Theory and Practice: Possibilities and Challenges for a Transformative Approach to Biodiversity Conservation. Conservation should be integrative, democratic and redistributive. Hard row to hoe.
- Emerging signals of declining forest resilience under climate change. Convivially or not, better conserve forests quickly.
- Adapting traditional industries to national park management: A conceptual framework and insights from two Chinese cases. Integrative and redistributive, but I’m not sure how democratic.
- Near- to long-term measures to stabilize global wheat supplies and food security. There’s a bunch of stuff that we can do in the short term, but in the end we’re going to need diverse, gender-equitable agro-ecosystems which are properly supported by investment in research. Sort of integrative, democratic and redistributive then, perhaps?
- From food price crisis to an equitable food system. Looks like the food system needs to be as convivial as conservation. If not more so.
- Trade and dietary preferences can determine micronutrient security in the United Kingdom. Going to be difficult to take back control of micronutrient security.
- Turning promise into practice: Crop biotechnology for increasing genetic diversity and climate resilience. Maybe biotech needs to be more convivial too.
- A conceptual framework for understanding the environmental impacts of ultra-processed foods and implications for sustainable food systems. Nothing convivial about ultra-processed foods, alas.
- Why food insecurity persists in sub-Saharan Africa: A review of existing evidence. Exports, basically. Looks like exports are really not very convivial.
- Crops in crises: Shocks shape smallholders’ diversification in rural Ethiopia. Farmers need continual access to both the informal and formal seed systems to mitigate risk, but poor farmers need more money to do so. Maybe link them up to export markets? No, wait…
- Traditional Agriculture and Food Sovereignty: Quilombola Knowledge and Management of Food Crops. Lots of conviviality, but not enough to fully mitigate risk.
- The role of international cooperative initiatives in financing biodiversity. Partnerships between state and a variety of non-state actors may just be an opportunity for more convivial conservation and food systems. But then I would say that.
Brainfood: AnGR in the US, Cloning, Reindeer diversity, Lactose persistence evolution, Fish menus, Vanilla agroforestry, Pollinators in India & the US, Dogs & people
- Development and utilization of the United States gene bank collection. Of animals, that is: 1.15 million samples from 59,640 animals, representing 44 species of livestock, aquatic and insect genetic resources, 191 breeds and 369 subpopulations.
- Healthy cloned offspring derived from freeze-dried somatic cells. Another way to conserve in genebanks like the above, at least for mice.
- Genetic differentiation between coexisting wild and domestic Reindeer (Rangifer tarandus L. 1758) in Northern Eurasia. Now there’s better information to help decide how to conserve both in genebanks and outside, at least for reindeer.
- Dairying, diseases and the evolution of lactase persistence in Europe. Being able to digest milk didn’t help Neolithic people much. But not being able to digest milk during famines or plagues was really bad for them. Yeah but now we’re stuck with all that livestock.
- Signature of climate-induced changes in seafood species served in restaurants. Since 1880, the mean temperature preference of fish on Vancouver’s menus has increased by 3°C. Soon some will need genebanks, I guess. Or domestication.
- Win-win opportunities combining high yields with high multi-taxa biodiversity in tropical agroforestry. You don’t necessarily have to pay for higher vanilla yields with lower biodiversity. Good, because you can’t put everything in a genebank, I guess.
- Functional diversity of farmland bees across rural–urban landscapes in a tropical megacity. Oh look, another win-win!
- A review of management actions on insect pollinators on public lands in the United States. As in tropical megacities, removing invasives is an unalloyed good.
- Human Ecology: Special Issue on Dogs. Whether you’re a dog person or not, it’s hard to argue that any domesticated animal has engaged in a more diverse set of interactions with humans. Truly a win-win. But please, let’s not clone Fido.
Brainfood: Wild scarlet runner beans, Wild coffee, Mexican vanilla, Hybrid barley, Zea genus, Wild maize gene, N-fixing xylem microbiota, Drone phenotyping, Wild tomato, Potato breeding, Wild potato, Wheat evaluation, Rice breeding returns
- The genomic signature of wild-to-crop introgression during the domestication of scarlet runner bean (Phaseolus coccineus L.). The wild Mexican genepool is helping to counteract the effects of the domestication bottleneck.
- Genetic variation in wild and cultivated Arabica coffee (Coffea arabica L.): Evolutionary origin, global distribution, and its effect on fungal disease incidence in Southwest Ethiopia. Domesticated disease-resistant cultivars are threatening the genetic integrity of the wild genepool. You win some, you lose some.
- Uncovering haplotype diversity in cultivated Mexican vanilla species. Plenty of evidence of past hybridization events in cultivated vanilla in Mexico. Maybe it can swap stories with scarlet runner bean.
- Six-rowed wild-growing barleys are hybrids of diverse origins. In the case of barley, the wild-cultivated hybrids even got a separate Latin binomial.
- Portrait of a genus: genome sequencing reveals evidence of adaptive variation in Zea. Lots of variation in interesting adaptive traits in the wild relatives of maize. Did they, or will they, make their way into the crop, I wonder?
- An adaptive teosinte mexicana introgression modulates phosphatidylcholine levels and is associated with maize flowering time. This one did.
- A highly conserved core bacterial microbiota with nitrogen-fixation capacity inhabits the xylem sap in maize plants. Its wild relatives are not the only wild organisms maize benefits from.
- Phenomic data-facilitated rust and senescence prediction in maize using machine learning algorithms. Drones and fancy maths can be used to predict and document southern rust infection in maize. Maybe in wild relatives too one day, who knows.
- A Solanum lycopersicoides reference genome facilitates insights into tomato specialized metabolism and immunity. A tomato wild relative has a gene for resistance to bacterial speck disease, so of course they had to sequence its genome.
- Genetic gains in potato breeding as measured by field testing of cultivars released during the last 200 years in the Nordic Region of Europe. Genetic gains for yield (measured in non-target environments) were not that great and contributed about half of productivity gains. Results for other traits were even worse, mainly because of stringent market demands. So no chance of using wild relatives I suppose.
- Genotypic Response and Selection of Potato Germplasm Under Heat Stress. Not so fast…
- Dataset of historic and modern bread and durum wheat cultivar performance under conventional and reduced tillage with full and reduced irrigation. I wonder to what extent wild relatives contributed to the differences.
- Assessing returns to research investments in rice varietal development: Evidence from the Philippines and Bangladesh. Net returns from collaboration in rice breeding between IRRI and national partners are still strong in the Philippines and Bangladesh, but declining, and faster in the former than the latter. Plenty of genes from wild relatives in IRRI lines of course. Maybe there could be more?
Brainfood: Organic tradeoffs, Yield gap, Genebank impact, Rice in Madagascar, Trees & diets, Trees & food system, Global tree diversity, Restoration & emissions
- Biodiversity and yield trade‐offs for organic farming. Switch to organic agriculture if the surrounding land that will need to be converted to farming to make up for production shortfalls is less than 2.4 times more biodiverse than the farmed land. But that’s an average that will depend on the crop.
- Global wheat production could benefit from closing the genetic yield gap. Customize improved wheat varieties to local conditions by using the diversity in genebanks. No word on whether that includes organic conditions.
- The impact of the international rice genebank (IRG) on rice farming in Bangladesh. Someone mention genebanks? 1% increase in genebank contribution to new variety means 1% increase in yield. No word on what happens under organic conditions.
- Constraints on Rice Cultivation in Eastern Madagascar: Which Factors Matter to Smallholders, and Which Influence Food Security? Does swidden cultivation count as organic?
- What are the links between tree-based farming and dietary quality for rural households? A review of emerging evidence in low- and middle-income countries. It’s generally a good idea to keep trees around your farm. But how to make sure that it happens?
- Transforming food systems with trees and forests. Here’s how: scale up tree food production, reorient research towards trees foods, repurposing production incentives towards tree foods, and integrate nutrition with conservation. Got it? No word on whether the whole thing needs to be organic though.
- High exposure of global tree diversity to human pressure. But what about the diversity of trees on farms? Well I guess if we do the above properly it will be ok.
- Carbon removals from nature restoration are no substitute for steep emission reductions. Trees are not enough.
Brainfood: Rice domestication, Roman wine, Dog domestication, Earth ovens, Forest orchards, Saffron origins
- The Fits and Starts of Indian Rice Domestication: How the Movement of Rice Across Northwest India Impacted Domestication Pathways and Agricultural Stories. While cultivation of (indica) rice in South Asia began in the Ganges around 6500 BC, its domestication really speeded up 3000 years later in the Indus.
- Archaeobotanical and chemical investigations on wine amphorae from San Felice Circeo (Italy) shed light on grape beverages at the Roman time. In the second century BC the ancient Romans may have traded a medicinal wine made from wild or semi-domesticated grapevines. I wonder how it would have gone with a nice risotto.
- Grey wolf genomic history reveals a dual ancestry of dogs. Either dogs were domesticated independently in E and W Eurasia and then the two lineages merged, or they were domesticated in the E and then there was geneflow from wild dogs. Sounds a bit like rice actually. ((No, really, check it out. Japonica gets domesticated in one place, then taken to another place where it gets into geneflow with indica, which is being domesticated elsewhere. Only difference is that 2 different wild species are involved, rather than just a single wild wolf species. Also maybe echoes of what happened in tomato too?))
- Bulbs and Biographies, Pine Nuts and Palimpsests: Exploring Plant Diversity and Earth Oven Reuse at a Late Period Plateau Site. For 2000 years Native Americans returned to specific food processing sites dug into the soil to cook up a storm. No word on the use of wild grapevines.
- Coupled archaeological and ecological analyses reveal ancient cultivation and land use in Nuchatlaht (Nuu-chah-nulth) territories, Pacific Northwest. Native Americans nurtured forest gardens to enrich them with edible species. Including wild apples though again not wild grapevines apparently.
- Ancient Artworks and Crocus Genetics Both Support Saffron’s Origin in Early Greece. Ok now everything is in place for a nice risotto alla Milanese with a Falanghina at the House of the Tragic Poet.