- Need a new pest or disease? Here’s the latest list from CAB Abstracts.
- WHO’s e-Library of Evidence for Nutrition Actions. No food, as such, that I could see.
- Is “famine” partly the result of a fixation on maize?
- Nah, course not. At least, I think not … “Drought persuades Kenya to import GM maize“.
- CIAT and partners toast new BREAD project. (FX: Groan.) It’s about breeding cassava and banana.
- Plant Breeders Without Borders. Read more here. Could do with a snappier title, I reckon.
- India’s long-range weather forecast looks bad.
- Modern vegetables are less nutritious.
Onions evaluated “for food security”
Scientists at Warwick University’s Crop Centre have examined “96 of the world’s onion varieties” for resistance to basal rot (caused by the ubiquitous Fusarium oxysporum) and their ability to form close relationships with certain beneficial fungi. The press release doesn’t go into any detail, such as which varieties top the lists, or anything useful like that, although it does raise some questions. Like, where were the onions from? Andrew Taylor, the researcher in charge, said this:
“We have developed a unique onion diversity set from material sourced from across the globe. We now have a extremely useful library of the variation in traits … all of which will be extremely useful to growers and seed producers dealing with changing conditions and threats to onion crops.”
Spiffy. And a nice alternative, eventually, to current control methods. But what exactly is this “unique onion diversity set”. Is it, by any chance, anything to do with the Allium collection maintained at the old UK National Vegetable Collection at Wellesbourne, recently threatened with closure? And if so, why wouldn’t that have been mentioned by the Warwick Crop Centre, which absorbed Wellesbourne and its Genetic Resources Unit? Surely anything good that comes out of the Wellesbourne genebank is an argument for continued support.
On a purely personal note, I’d love to know whether two varieties, Up-to-date and Bedfordshire Champion, were among the 96 that were evaluated. That’s because in 1948 the UK Ministry of Agriculture Fisheries and Food noted that Up-to-date had excellent resistance to white rot, while Bedfordshire Champion was highly susceptible. In the mid 1960s, MAFF decided they were the same variety, under synonyms, and dropped Up-to-date from the National Catalogue.Wellesbourne did maintain it, and it would be interesting to know whether the two had different profiles in this latest round of evaluation.
Brainfood: Genetic isolation and climate change, Not a Sicilian grape variety, Sicilian oregano, Good wine and climate, Italian landraces, Amazonian isolation, Judging livestock, Endosymbionts and CCD, Herbal barcodes, Finnish barley, Wild pigeonpea, Protected areas, Tree hybrids
- The impact of distance and a shifting temperature gradient on genetic connectivity across a heterogeneous landscape. Climate change bringing formerly genetically isolated populations together, possibly increasing adaptive potential.
- Intra-varietal genetic diversity of the grapevine (Vitis vinifera L.) cultivar ‘Nero d’Avola’ as revealed by microsatellite markers. 15 distinct genetic group among 118 plants from 30 Sicilian vineyards seems quite a lot.
- Emerging cultivation of oregano in Sicily: Sensory evaluation of plants and chemical composition of essential oils. More from Sicily. Wild is best.
- Effect of vineyard-scale climate variability on Pinot noir phenolic composition. Its complicated. But at least Pinot noir is not like Nero d’Avola. Or is it? Oh, crap.
- Landraces in Inland areas of the Basilicata region, Italy: monitoring and perspectives for on farm conservation. “Farmer-maintainers” of landraces tend to be old and isolated. Interesting stratified sampling strategy. Basilicata? They grow horseradish there, don’t they? They do indeed.
- Critical distances: Comparing measures of spatial accessibility in the riverine landscapes of Peruvian Amazonia. GIS-calculated time-based accessibility influences rural livelihoods and land use pressure. And agrobiodiversity? Apply to Basilicata next?
- A morphological assessment system for ‘show quality’ bovine livestock based on image analysis. Image of side of animal fed through neural network almost as good as experts in determining how beautiful the animal is. well there’s a triumph for science.
- Endosymbionts and honey bee colony losses? Something else to add to the list of possible causes of colony collapse disorder.
- Commercial teas highlight plant DNA barcode identification successes and obstacles. About a third of products revealed signatures of stuff that was not listed in the ingredients, but that could be due to a number of reasons.
- What would happen to barley production in Finland if global warming exceeded 4°C? A model-based assessment. Nothing good, surprisingly. Better get some new varieties, I guess.
- Cajanus platycarpus (Benth.) Maesen as the donor of new pigeonpea cytoplasmic male sterile (CMS) system. Gotta love those CWRs.
- Australia’s Stock Route Network: 1. A review of its values and implications for future management. Established for movement of livestock before trucks and trains, but has lots of endangered species and communities. Great value on many fronts, in fact. Needs proper governance though.
- Should forest restoration with natural hybrids be allowed? Yep.
Nibbles: Agroforestry, Maize breeding, Sorghum diversity, Wine sustainability, Soybean diversity, Permaculture
- Mexico Promotes Agroforestry For Arid Areas.
- How to pollinate sweetcorn, because you can never have too many how-tos.
- Diverse sorghums for diverse uses in Burundi.
- Watch out for carbon-footprint labels on your wine.
- Looking for dynamite soybean diversity? Go to Sweden. Really.
- The New York Times discovers permaculture. h/t Mauri.
Ecological intensification at IBC18
Doyle McKey‘s presentation at IBC18 sounds like a doozy. I was alerted to it by Eve Emshwiller on Twitter, who said, among other things:
McKey: ecological intensification, not just green revolution model “intensification” of ag needed. #ibc18
Music to our ears, of course. Here’s a summary from the (very large) Abstract Book of the congress.
The evolutionary ecology of plant chemical defenses in agroecosystems: past, present and future.
McKey, Gleadow, Cavagnaro
Plant chemical defenses mediate interactions between plants, their herbivores and pathogens, and the naturalenemies of these plant parasites. In domesticated plants, farmers are added to this web of interactions. Plant defenses have been subjected to complex selection pressures under domestication, leading both to decreases and to increases in their concentration, and to shifts in their intra-plant distribution. This complexity is explained partly by variation in the kinds of plants farmers chose to domesticate, and partly by the kinds of environments that nature and farmers combined to create in agroecosystems. Today, the interactions mediated by plant defenses are affected by changing climate, rising temperature and increased atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide. These changes can threaten food security by lowering not only the production of food but also its nutritional quality. The strategies proposed to counter these threats envisage a wide range of ways, not mutually exclusive, to manage biotic interactions in agroecosystems. These include modifying crop plants’ natural constitutive and induced defenses and other sources of resistance; engineering crop plants to express novel defenses; and increasing the effectiveness of ‘integrated pest management’ (through natural enemies, other components of agrobiodiversity and pesticides) by modifying the structure and functioning of agroecosystems. In this presentation, we examine these proposed solutions through the evolutionary ecologist’s lens: What are their respective costs and benefits, and how do these affect the ecological situations in which each could help farmers produce sufficient amounts of high-quality food? How can the coevolutionary dynamics of interactions between crop plants and their biotic environment be managed to avert catastrophic fluctuation of yield?