- What the Pacific islands need to do about climate change. What, nothing about conserving and using crop diversity? My friends at CePaCT will be pissed.
- What West African farmers are doing about climate change.
- Yeah, I guess it’s not always and only about crop diversity. But would it kill them to mention it?
- And if you’re interested where the Pacific (and West Africa, and everywhere else) gets its food from…
- Peruvian black mint is a thing. But not a relative of coriander.
- Yaupon is also a thing. Though it won’t go far with that scientific name.
- Recreating a Renaissance herb garden. Because we can. Where’s the Peruvian black mint, though?
- Eat rare breeds to conserve them. Not rare advice.
- No wall can keep out landrace maize.
- Ethiopian beer gets a boost.
Brainfood: Agricultural heritage, Unique maize, B4N, Flax core evaluation, Oca conservation, Ag expansion, Rose wild relative, Quinoa evaluation, Nepal seed systems, Amazonian domestication, Analysing germplasm data
- Agricultural Heritage Systems: A Bridge between Urban and Rural Development. “…agricultural heritage systems can take full advantage of abundant funds…” Really?
- Multi cob-bearing popcorn (Puakzo) maize: a unique landrace of Mizoram, North East, India. Would be nice to know how unique globally.
- Enabled or disabled: Is the environment right for using biodiversity to improve nutrition? Maybe, in some places.
- Orbitide Composition of Flax Core Collection (FCC). In other news, Canada has a flax core collection.
- Farmer Perspectives on OCA (Oxalis tuberosa; Oxalidaceae) Diversity Conservation: Values and Threats. It’s the cultural value, stupid. And weevils.
- The expansion of modern agriculture and global biodiversity decline: an integrated assessment. Fancy maths shows that if you assume that unabated agricultural expansion is bad in a particular way, you can come up with a model which spares land at a modest cost to per capita consumption, given decent investment in research.
- Nuclear genetic variation of Rosa odorata var. gigantea (Rosaceae): population structure and conservation implications. Wild relative of domesticated rose shows lots of diversity and two distinct populations either side of a fault zone in China.
- Worldwide Evaluation of Quinoa: Preliminary Results from Post International Year of Quinoa FAO Projects in 9 Countries. 19 sites, 21 genotypes, a few winners. But the real story is how difficult it was to get hold of the material in the first place.
- Shaping Seed Regulation in Nepal: The Role of Networks, Community and Informality. The formal needs to recognize the informal. And vice versa.
- Crop domestication in the upper Madeira River basin. Nice, brief review of evidence of domestication for a number of crops along one branch of the Amazon.
- Analysing genebank collections using “R”: Making trait information widely available to users. NordGen takes genebank data analysis to the masses. And about time too.
Plant Genetic Resources: Our challenges, our food, our future
As predicted a few days ago, here’s Dr Mike Jackson’s report on that 2 June meeting on plant genetic resources organized by doctoral students at the School of Biosciences, University of Birmingham.
When I was asked to contribute a paper I had to think hard and long about a suitable topic. I’ve always been passionate about the use of plant genetic diversity to increase food security. I decided therefore to talk about the value of genebank collections, how that value might be measured, and I provided examples of how germplasm had been used to increase the productivity of both potatoes and rice.
If you have your own examples, leave a comment on Mike’s blog.
Nibbles: Agroecology, Seaweed, Groundnut genomes, Roman food, Nature
- It’s not the science, stupid.
- More kelp, sir?
- New genome promises
world dominationnon-allergenic peanut. - The diet of Roman soldiers in Glasgow could have been worse. But did they have take-out?
- There is no more Nature, capital N.
Brainfood: Yam protection, Gleditsia distribution, Seed systems, Conservation narratives, Roselle diversity, Hassawi extinction, Apple GWAS, Dog domestication
- Disease risk perception and diversity of management strategies by farmers: The case of anthracnose caused by Colletotrichum gloeosporioides on water yams (Dioscorea alata) in Guadeloupe. Farmers gauge the disease pretty much the way scientists do, and use a diversity of mitigation measures, including diversity.
- Ghosts of Cultivation Past – Native American Dispersal Legacy Persists in Tree Distribution. “In the southern Appalachian region, honey locust distributions are more a reflection of Native American cultural practices.”
- Good year, bad year: changing strategies, changing networks? A two-year study on seed acquisition in northern Cameroon. In bad years, women call on extended networks.
- Conservation narratives in Peru: envisioning biodiversity in sustainable development. In terms of the relationship between conservation and development, there are biodiversity protectionists, traditionalists, localists, pragmatists, and capitalists.
- Diversity analysis based on agro-morphological traits and microsatellite based markers in global germplasm collections of roselle (Hibiscus sabdariffa L.). Nicely complementary datasets show that fibre type more diverse than calyx type.
- Extinction probabilities of Hassawi cattle from Saudi Arabia using Population Viability Analysis. Fancy maths gives it 20 years.
- Genome to Phenome Mapping in Apple Using Historical Data. Going back to old phenotype data in GRIN allowed identification of SNPs for color, fruit firmness, and harvest time.
- Genomic and archaeological evidence suggest a dual origin of domestic dogs. Independent domestications from different wolf populations in East Asia and in Western Europe, with the latter partially displacing the former.