- E-book on using crop wild relatives in breeding.
- The aesthetics of conserving seeds.
- The best corn for whiskey.
- Going back to sorghum in Kenya.
- Another take on how to make a cool scientific poster.
- One way to crunch the numbers on eating local.
Not that kind of flesh
Oh, Twitter, you’re such a tease.
Knowing that I am currently working on orange-fleshed sweetpotatoes, Luigi kindly sent me a link to a tweet. This one:
That red ellipse? I’m drawing your attention to Twitter’s warning that seeing the images might bring on an attack of the vapours in highly-attuned personalities.
Is it just the word “fleshed”? I had to know.
I dunno. “Filth,” they say, “is in the mind of the beholder” and I have to say, I’m not seeing it.
Orange-flesh, though. Where else have I seen that? Maybe that’s what Twitter is trying to warn me against.
No matter. Congratulations to @CIPotato and @RTB_CGIAR.
Nibbles: CGN, Software, Foods, MSB, Old date, Cacao lab, Cherokee seeds, Data viz, Popmillets
- New-look website for the Dutch genebank.
- Software for germplasm management.
- 198 countries, 198 fave foods.
- A visit to the MSB. With video goodness.
- Cherokee Nation sends sacred seeds to Svalbard. No video yet.
- Update on that 2000-year-old date.
- UC Davis gets a new cacao lab from Mars. Maybe a genebank next?
- Plot your data online, why don’t you.
- Puffing up millets.
Brainfood: Agrobiodiversity Index, Breeding strategy, Soybean breeding, Red Listing, Stunting, Planetary boundaries, ITPGRFA, Wheat domestication, Anthropogenic fire double, Japonica diversity, Rice landraces, Tepary breeding, Lupin genome, Hazelnut diversity, Lapita food
- Text Mining National Commitments towards Agrobiodiversity Conservation and Use. Fancy maths cannot find evidence of country commitment to seed diversity.
- Optimized breeding strategies to harness Genetic Resources with different performance levels. How a public breeding programme can help out private breeding programme.
- Introgression of novel genetic diversity to improve soybean yield. Public breeding programme helps out private breeding programme. I suppose both got something out of it.
- Rapid Least Concern: towards automating Red List assessments. Nifty web application takes all the fun out of red listing. We talked about this, people.
- Mapping child growth failure across low- and middle-income countries. Even countries and regions that are generally doing well have stubborn hotspots.
- Feeding ten billion people is possible within four terrestrial planetary boundaries. Feeding, but not necessarily nourishing.
- Genebank Operation in the Arena of Access and Benefit-Sharing Policies. Use the SMTA for everything.
- Multiregional origins of the domesticated tetraploid wheats. Semi-domesticated in the southern Levant, then moved to the northern Fertile Crescent to be finished off. Compare and contrast with barley.
- Conservation implications of limited Native American impacts in pre-contact New England. Native Americans didn’t manage woodland by controlled burning after all…
- Global change impacts on forest and fire dynamics using paleoecology and tree census data for eastern North America. …Sure they did. Interesting discussion on this on Twitter.
- Multiple streams of genetic diversity in Japonica rice. It’s basically a pan-genome.
- Genomic analyses reveal selection footprints in rice landraces grown under on‐farm conservation conditions during a short‐term period of domestication. Some interesting genetic changes after 27 years of on-farm management, but no erosion.
- Breeding tepary bean (Phaseolus acutifolius) for drought adaptation: A review. You need other species.
- High-quality genome sequence of white lupin provides insight into soil exploration and seed quality. Winter and spring varieties are genetically distinct from each other, and from landraces.
- Genetic diversity and domestication of hazelnut (Corylus avellana L.) in Turkey. Hardly domesticated at all.
- Exploitation and utilization of tropical rainforests indicated in dental calculus of ancient Oceanic Lapita culture colonists. Including bananas.
- Benchmarking genetic diversity in a third-generation breeding population of Melaleuca alternifolia. There’s still quite a bit of diversity around.
Brainfood: Food sustainability, Phenotyping barriers, Andean agrobiodiversity, Mango diversity, Wild Brassica diversity, Domestication database, Future crops, Great Dying, Food supplies, Nutritious ag, Wild olives, Pink cassava, Landrace diversity
- Global map and indicators of food system sustainability. Includes crop diversity, based on Khoury et al.
- Phenotyping and Plant Breeding: Overcoming the Barriers. Mostly comes down to good experimental design.
- The Spatial-Temporal Dynamics of Potato Agrobiodiversity in the Highlands of Central Peru: A Case Study of Smallholder Management across Farming Landscapes. Intensification and upward movement, while maintaining diversity.
- Diversity of a Large Collection of Natural Populations of Mango (Mangifera indica Linn.) Revealed by Agro-Morphological and Quality Traits. Lowish diversity, but not so low as to fail to provide year-round production.
- Intraspecific diversification of the crop wild relative Brassica cretica Lam. using demographic model selection. Diverse populations do not necessarily mean diverse adaptation.
- Crop Origins and Phylo Food: A database and a phylogenetic tree to stimulate comparative analyses on the origins of food crops. When and where current crops were domesticated.
- The climatic challenge: Which plants will people use in the next century? When and where future crops will be domesticated.
- Earth system impacts of the European arrival and Great Dying in the Americas after 1492. 56 million deaths.
- Multidimensional characterization of global food supply from 1961 to 2013. Animal-source foods + sugar up in the East, down in the West. Everybody’s eating their vegetables.
- Exploring solution spaces for nutrition-sensitive agriculture in Kenya and Vietnam. Could grown more, and different, vegetables.
- Evaluation of early vigor traits in wild olive germplasm. Potential as dwarfing rootstocks.
- Agronomic and biochemical evaluation of cassava clones with roots that have pink pulp. 2 of 9 from the Embrapa collection have potential.
- Management Practices and Breeding History of Varieties Strongly Determine the Fine Genetic Structure of Crop Populations: A Case Study Based on European Wheat Populations. Landraces show more intra-sample diversity than modern varieties. Wait, there must be more to it than that…
- High-resolution and bias-corrected CMIP5 projections for climate change impact assessments. 7 TB of data for your delectation, thanks to CGIAR.