- Genetic structuring of remnant forest patches in an endangered medicinal tree in North-western Ethiopia. You need to conserve a range of patches of Prunus africana, and probably not just in situ. Would have been perfect for last week’s Brainfood on the complementarity of ex situ and in situ.
- Using simulations to optimize genetic diversity in Prunus avium seed harvests. And if you were to collect seeds for ex situ conservation, this is how you could do it, or at least figure out how best to do it.
- Exploring the Role of Agricultural Extension in Promoting Biodiversity Conservation in Kwazulu-Natal Province, South Africa. Don’t look to extension for help though.
- Ex situ plant conservation initiative in developing country: Nepal as a case study. Wonder if the material in the Himalayan Seed Bank was collected in that way. Or with the help of extensionists for that matter.
- The Electronic Trade in Greek Endemic Plants: Biodiversity, Commercial and Legal Aspects. Or indeed the 10% of the endemic Greek flora that’s traded online. Yeah I know this was in the special Easter Brainfood, but I couldn’t resist the narrative.
- New sources of resistance to Phytophthora capsici in Capsicum spp. For Korea, that is. But they came from all over. As ever.
- Hosting major international events leads to pest redistributions. Watch out Brazil!
- Pyrenean meadows in Natura 2000 network: grass production and plant biodiversity conservation. Forbs are unjustly maligned. Probably starts with that silly name.
- Chemical Changes during Open and Controlled Fermentation of Cowpea (Vigna unguiculata) Flour. Fermentation detoxifies and doesn’t affect nutritional content much. No word on whether it helps with all the farting. Evaluate that!
- Geographical Gradient of the eIF4E Alleles Conferring Resistance to Potyviruses in Pea (Pisum) Germplasm. Gargantuan study of 2,800 global accessions finds 4 resistance alleles, each with its own geographic structure. Much variation, but no resistance in the wild relatives. Bummer.
- Phenotypic and molecular studies for genetic stability assessment of cryopreserved banana meristems derived from field and in vitro explant sources. You can cryopreserve straight from field-grown sucker meristems, rather than having to go through tissue culture. Handy.
- Assemblage Time Series Reveal Biodiversity Change but Not Systematic Loss. Ecosystems are changing, but not yet becoming noticeably less diverse.
Special Brainfood Extra: Economic Botany, Volume 68, Number 1
A whole issue of a journal given the Brainfood treatment. Because I’ve got allergies and can’t go out and it’s a holiday and I’m bored. Think of it as an Easter egg. Unnecessary, but tasty.
- Are Ecologically Important Tree Species the Most Useful? A Case Study from Indigenous People in the Bolivian Amazon. Among medicinal and edible species, the most used are not the ones that most strike you as you walk around. Unlike the case for species used in construction and crafts.
- The Electronic Trade in Greek Endemic Plants: Biodiversity, Commercial and Legal Aspects. Seemingly profitable, but possibly largely illegal. And I’m willing to bet that the ones that are most traded are the ones that are most difficult to find.
- Medicinal Plant Trade in Sierra Leone: Threats and Opportunities for Conservation. No internet involved, but still profitable. For how long? I guess that depends on how easy they are to find, and harvest sustainably.
- Structure and Floristic Composition of Forest Management Systems Associated with the Edible Fruit Tree Oecopetalum mexicanum in the Sierra de Misantla, Veracruz, Mexico. You can manage a landscape to favour a particular, strikingly important species, and also promote diversity.
- Contemporary Gathering Practice and Antioxidant Benefit of Wild Seaweeds in Hawai’i. No word on whether the most obvious ones are are the ones that are most used, but I gotta believe that they are.
- The Food System during the Formative Period in West Mesoamerica. Advent of ceramics may have had an important effect on crops and food.
- Fuelling the Ancient Maya Salt Industry. Not to mention on their seasoning.
- Identification of Cannabis Fiber from the Astana Cemeteries, Xinjiang, China, with Reference to Its Unique Decorative Utilization. Used to make the tails on horse figurines. No word on further, ahem, ritual uses.
- Big Messages in Small Details: Nature in Roman Archaeology. Even the small details of the natural world on the Ara Pacis have meaning. Like the horses’ tails?
Brainfood: Wheat resistance, Wild barley regeneration, Barley improvement, Maize regeneration, Seed pathogens, Colombian rice management, Malawi diversity & nutrition, Modelling pollinators, Women & seeds, Vietnam development, European agrobiodiversity, CIP sweet potato goes to China, American NUS
- Gene bank of sources of spring wheat resistance to leaf-stem diseases. Crop wild relatives to the rescue.
- Evolutionary History of Wild Barley (Hordeum vulgare subsp. spontaneum) Analyzed Using Multilocus Sequence Data and Paleodistribution Modeling. Recently collected material gives different results to genebank accessions, suggesting geneflow during ex situ maintenance?
- Barley genetic variation: implications for crop improvement. “Contemporary plant breeders now benefit from publicly available user-friendly databases providing genotypic and phenotypic information on large numbers of barley accessions.” Barley Genebank Database Heaven? Should talk to the guys above?
- Detection of genetic integrity of conserved maize (Zea mays L.) germplasm in genebanks using SNP markers. Oh crap, that problem with ex situ barley maintenance is an issue with maize as well.
- Incidence of Seed-Borne Mycoflora in Wheat and Rice Germplasm. Oh, I give up, genebanks are doomed.
- Ethnophytopathology: Rice Fields Free of Diseases, from the Culture of Producers in a Nuquí, Chocó-Colombia´s Community. Careful placement of fields in the landscape ensures they don’t get diseases. Who needs genebanks and breeders?
- Farm production diversity is associated with greater household dietary diversity in Malawi: Findings from nationally representative data. Yeah, but settle down, it’s kinda complicated.
- Landscape fragmentation and pollinator movement within agricultural environments: a modelling framework for exploring foraging and movement ecology. Don’t know how your set-asides and whatnots are going to affect pollinators? Well, now there’s a spatially explicit model for that. Which could perhaps be applied to…
- Complex effects of fragmentation on remnant woodland plant communities of a rapidly urbanizing biodiversity hotspot. Would be so interesting to know if there were any socioconomically useful plants (including crop wild relatives) among these remnants.
- Gender, Seeds and Biodiversity. Whether in Pennsylvania or Peru, it’s women that save seeds. (This is from an old book, which has presumably just been digitized, hence its appearance in my RSS feed.)
- Land Use Dynamics, Climate Change, and Food Security in Vietnam: A Global-to-local Modeling Approach. Agriculture is at risk. Better collect all that germplasm. Right? Right?
- Responses of plants, earthworms, spiders and bees to geographic location, agricultural management and surrounding landscape in European arable fields. Mineral N and pesticides not good for agricultural biodiversity. Too bad you can’t really conserve earthworms ex situ.
- Identification and evaluation of major quality characters of introduced sweet potato germplasm resources. 4 accessions out of 32 from CIP were likely to prove very useful, for different reasons. I’d say that was pretty good.
- Conservation and use of genetic resources of underutilized crops in the Americas – A continental analysis. Some underused crops are more underused than others, but policies don’t help any of them much.
- And this week’s theme, I’ve just realized, somewhat belatedly, is the complementarity of ex situ and in situ conservation. No, really, go back and check. And it was purely by chance too.
Brainfood: By-the-numbers Indian edition, with a touch of Bangladesh
- SGDB: A Sugarcane Germplasm Database. Cool, but only 131 accessions? One would have thought there’d be more.
- Essential Oil Composition of Bothriochloa bladhii (Retz.) S.T. Blake: An Introduction from Tropical Region of Western Ghats of India. It’s a widespread neotropical grass. There are about 200 accessions in the world’s genebanks. I wonder if this lot will end up there too.
- Conservation of agricultural biodiversity – an experience in the Chotonagpur plateau region. By the Indian Statistical Institute, Giridih. 40 horsegrams collected, among other things. Does NBPGR know? Is there a database?
- Genome Classification of Musa cultivars from Northeast India as Revealed by ITS and IRAP Markers. 36 out of 38 cultivars had been correctly identified on morphology. Relationship to the national banana collection unclear.
- Correlation and Path Coefficient Analysis of Quantitative Characters in Spine Gourd (Momordica dioica Roxb.). Now we know what to select for. 50 accessions used.
- Population structure and genetic diversity analysis of Indian and exotic rice (Oryza sativa L.) accessions using SSR markers. Microsat study of 82 Asian genotypes, including some from India, identifies a few markers of use in breeding. Wheel successfully re-invented.
- Livelihood and Revenue: Role of rattans among Mongoloid tribes and settlers of Andaman and Nicobar Islands, India. Sources of food, building materials and money (via export trade), but only if harvesting is sustainable, which it doesn’t look like it is. Need a plan, including better silviculture and rotational harvesting. Oh, and get rid of the middlemen.
- Bioprospecting, biopiracy and food security in India: The emerging sides of neoliberalism. All of the above are potential neoliberal stooges.
- Comparative karyomorphological studies of three edible locally important species of Allium from India. A chive is not a chive is not a chive. But it’s hard work to tell them apart.
- Crop diversification, crop and energy productivity under raised and sunken beds: results from a seven-year study in a high rainfall organic production system. Rotations including vegetables all round better than rice monocropping. Nothing neoliberal about that. But who does nothing but rice monocropping? I guess these guys could tell you…
A food historian at CIMMYT
Noted food historian Rachel Laudan was at the recent Borlaug Summit on Wheat for Food Security in Obregón, Mexico, organized by CIMMYT to celebrate 100 years of Norman Borlaug, and what an inspired decision it was to invite her. She spoke at the conference about the foundational role of wheat in the development of civilization, and I hope her slides and perhaps even a video of her presentation, along with those of the other distinguished speakers, will be made available. In the meantime, her blog post on the experience provides a refreshingly different perspective than is usually provided by participants at this sort of conference. ((If you’re on Facebook, you can follow a discussion that’s developing there on the post.)) Too bad she didn’t get to see the CIMMYT genebank…