- Fishing in the gene pool, a presentation from that Eucarpia meeting.
- The Maine Law Review publishes a whole bunch of papers on food systems in the US and elsewhere.
- While Ensia publishes just one: food rethought.
- Conservation Magazine points to a nifty idea from Australia: Fluker posts. Citizen science for monitoring landscape change. Can we get some agricultural ones?
- Speaking of citizens: new book on farmers’ rights.
- Indians told to eat their (native) vegetables.
Varieties of climate change
Something is up, no doubt about it. First off, PBS in the US has a longish news report on how farmers in India “find promise in ancient seeds”.
Watch Struggling Farmers in India Find Promise in Ancient Seeds on PBS. See more from PBS NewsHour.
Strangely, although the farmers are able to find promise in ancient seeds, the report claims that seeds stored at IRRI in the 1960s are too ancient to be viable. Not sure how that works.
One of the protagonists of the PBS video, Debal Deb, crops up again in another video that came to light on the PAR website. According to PAR: “This film follows the construction of a new seed bank premises in Odisha, a venture that provides a potent symbol of Debal’s values”.
With the zeitgeist firmly embracing the idea of agricultural biodiversity, preferably ancient agricultural biodiversity, as a suitable response to climate change, it is good to be reminded that droughts are diverse too. David Lobell looks at two recent scientific papers on drought tolerance. One shows very little difference between specifically “drought-tolerant” maize varieties and other varieties without the drought-tolerance genes.
To me, there are a couple of possible ways to interpret this. One is that the newer varieties being marketed by companies are not really much better in general. Or these results might indicate that the types of droughts the newer varieties were designed for are somehow different than the type of droughts they were exposed to in this experiment. In particular, as we’ve discussed in prior posts, 2012 was a drought characterized by very high temperatures and vapor pressure deficits, the kind of droughts that one expects more of with climate change.
2012, in other words, was not just a dry drought but a hot drought. The other study David looks at compares the two kinds of drought.
What’s really interesting is how remarkably low the correlation between performance in “drought” and “drought+heat” is (0.08).
While not reading too much into either study, Lobell cautions that very hot droughts may require different kinds of varieties from mere dry droughts.
Nibbles: Indigenous conservation, Rice and conservation, Amazon medicines, Organic products, Sustainable oysters, Cherfas at Seed Savers, Calestous Juma, Cassava website, Israeli agritech, Fragaria breeding, Catacol whitebeam, Weather sensors, FAO Commission & Conference, Amartya Sen
- A toolkit to help indigenous communities do conservation. Should they need one.
- On the other hand… Half of Japan’s endangered species hotspots are found in satoyama, which are under pressure. Compare and contrast with rice farming in Thailand.
- Learn all about some medicinal plants of the Amazon, minus their scientific names. Not including runa tea. Lots of other opportunities out there, though.
- Maybe even including oysters.
- Jeremy no doubt to feast on the mollusc after spilling the beans on the EU seed regulations at the Seed Savers jamboree.
- Wonder what Calestous Juma thinks of those regulations.
- But I bet he (and his father, who introduced the crop to his region of Kenya) would like this cassava website to rule them all.
- The Volcani Institute‘s gifts to the world…
- …probably include new strawberries, but not this one.
- Scientists straining, failing to find plant to meaningfully compare to the giant panda.
- Bioversity does up its iButtons.
- And gets a namecheck in a paean to the FAO Commission on GRFA on its 30th birthday. All this FAO stuff is because its Conference is on this week. I don’t suppose any of it will be more important than Amartya Sen’s speech.
Brainfood: Maize rhizosphere, Climate change vulnerability, Heterosis squared, African forests, Sequencing genebanks
- Diversity and heritability of the maize rhizosphere microbiome under field conditions. There’s a lot of it, but only measured in inbreds so far. One wonders about landraces.
- The Vulnerability of Biodiversity to Rapid Climate Change. We should focus on increasing the adaptive capacity of species and ecosystems, but predictions are difficult, especially about the future.
- The Capsella rubella genome and the genomic consequences of rapid mating system evolution. Sex is better with two.
- Progress Toward Understanding Heterosis in Crop Plants & Genomic and epigenetic insights into the molecular bases of heterosis. It’s the allelic interactions, stupid. Now to make use of this.
- Deforestation in an African biodiversity hotspot: Extent, variation and the effectiveness of protected areas. Protected areas have worked for the evergreen forest, but don’t forget the miombo! Would be intersting to know what this all means for crop wild relatives.
- Comprehensive genotyping of the USA national maize inbred seed bank. Ladies and gentlemen, I have seen the future of genebanks.
Eucarpia fishing in Malmo
The meeting of Eucarpia’s Genetic Resources Section is taking place in Malmo, Sweden this week, under the catchy title of “Pre-breeding — fishing in the gene pool.” Lots of old friends there. Maybe someone will tweet: there is a hashtag, but not much action yet.
LATER: No tweets yet, but here’s one presentation at least.