- I’ve long thought that getting rid of the Aswan High Dam would be the best way Egypt could improve its food security.
- New video from Biofortified, how to pollinate carrots and beets.
- Hey Lawyers; time to study the commons! Including genetic resources? h/t capri.
- Today’s gene banks will save the world story is about cashews.
- Today’s rich world saving heritage varieties story is from Quebec.
- Today’s old stories given new legs story is about paying farmers for ecosystem services.
- Wired magazine discovers pastured poultry. Can the rest of the world be far behind?
- Proposal for a conference session on prehistoric globalisation of food. I’d be there if I could.
- And more from the Archaeobotanist, another journal special issue on Near Eastern domestication.
- CCAFS highlights (and links to) ICRAF report on climate change options for Southeast Asian Farmers
- Danforth Center depicts evolution of plant science, devaluing the word inforgraphic [sic] beyond repair.
- Viking beer. Sköl, or something.
New Plant Hardiness Zone Map ready for prime time
There’s a USDA media blitz on about the new Plant Hardiness Zone Map for the United States.
The 2012 USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map is the standard by which gardeners and growers can determine which plants are most likely to thrive at a location. The map is based on the average annual minimum winter temperature, divided into 10-degree F zones.
You can read the paper. You can read the press coverage. And you can watch the video.
The good news for America’s 80 million gardeners is that for the first time the map is available in an online interactive version, and is a lot more accurate. The bad news is that things are getting hotter, and many of those gardeners are going to have to rethink their choices:
The new PHZM is generally one half-zone warmer than the previous PHZM throughout much of the United States, as a result of a more recent averaging period (1974–1986 vs. 1976–2005).
But then we knew that. As far as I can see, you can’t compare the new version with the old online, side by side kind of thing. That would be one powerful climate change advocacy tool, wouldn’t it. Gardeners don’t like to be messed with, in my experience.
Nibbles: Mike Jackson blog, Philippines genebank fire, Ancient garden, USA maps, Horse domestication, Gnats, Livestock training, Chocolate, Epigenetics, Indian nutritional security, Kew fund, GM bananas, Reconciling databases
- Mike Jackson gets himself a pulpit. Welcome to the blogosphere, Mike!
- More on the Filipino ex-genebank.
- What they grew in an ancient Israelite garden. Can they really tell Citrus species apart from their pollen?
- More American maps to mashup with obesity and food insecurity: land use, renewable energy sources…. I do hope someone is keeping track. Even of the more esoteric stuff, of course, like the names of softdrinks.
- Yet more on horse domestication.
- Another organic farming externality for your consideration. Thanks, Robert.
- ILRI gets innovative on this whole training thing.
- “The future of chocolate” revealed.
- Boffins look at fossil bison epigenetics to investigate adaptation to climate change. What will they think of next. Well, applying it to chickens, for a start.
- Other boffins move potato anti-nematode genes into bananas. No word on the epigenetics of it all.
- Indian report on how to strengthen role of agriculture in nutrition.
- Kew has money for fieldwork.
- Cleaning messy taxonomic data. Useful in Genebank Database Hell?
Brainfood: Tea, NGS, Grandmothers, Anti-scorbutics, Barley population structure, Climate change below ground, Rice
- Genetic structure and diversity of India hybrid tea. It’s complicated. It’s important because the success of tea outside its core are is due to hybridization between Indian and Chinese types in Assam starting in 1875. It’s limited.
- NGS technologies for analyzing germplasm diversity in genebanks. That’s Next-Generation Sequencing. Can be used to “identify patterns of genetic diversity, map quantitative traits and mine novel alleles.” Recommendation is for “genotyping by sequencing” to be applied stepwise, starting with a core collection. That’ll be complicated, but the real bottleneck will be the phenotyping.
- The role and influence of grandmothers on child nutrition: culturally designated advisors and caregivers. Wise up, nutrition advocates. You are, apparently, ignoring egg-suckers, a primary force for good.
- The importance of eating local: slaughter and scurvy in Antarctic cuisine. Who needs oranges when you have fresh penguin at hand?
- Islands and streams: clusters and gene flow in wild barley populations from the Levant. There is ecogeographic patterning in the wild material, once you remove the effect of recent admixture with cultivated barley. Geneflow is more N to S than vice versa.
- Global change belowground: impacts of elevated CO2, nitrogen, and summer drought on soil food webs and biodiversity. It’s complex, really complex; increased CO2 and N may result in new, simpler belowground assemblages.
- Rice and Language Across Asia: Crops, Movement, and Social Change. An entire issue of Rice journal.
Nibbles: Microbial diversity, Blog, Yams, Benefits of diversity, Ancient ploughing, Oman’s genebank, Lodoicea, Wheat senescence, Maize landrace marketing, Setaria flowering, Prisoner yams, Eating weed
- Microbiologist makes Guardians of Microbial Diversity award. Agromicrobes awaited.
- Fabulous giant new superinteresting megablog scheduled to launch today.
NoRSS.Yet? - Who likes which yams (by which they mean Dioscorea) in Madagascar? Kew will have answers.
- Genetic diversity invades the zeitgeist, or something.
- Or would you prefer something a little more down to earth?
- Oldest ploughed fields in Czech lands.
- Crazy mixed up report on this weeks new genebank, in
OmanQatar. “Up to 10,000 genes”? Be still my beating heart. - Ich bin ein coco-de-mer-nut.
- Heat speeds up wheat aging. I know how it feels.
- A “Starbucks Of Tortillas”? Sounds worse than it is.
- Welcome news of fundamental work on a “minor” millet.
- IITA goes to jail.
- Genetically modifying cannabis to make it safe to eat. Such a bad idea. On so many levels.