- George Washington Carver‘s legacy lives on.
- Finding drought-resistant bananas: the movie.
- Mining wild wheat. Again.
- The definitive book on hot peppers in China. And I’ll save you a few clicks, here’s the video alluded to in the review.
- The definitive book on tea. Not just China either.
Chimps shit in the woods
Our friend Alex Chepstow-Lusty and co-authors have another paper out on the forests of Central Africa in the late Holocene. The import of this latest piece of work is that when the forests bounced back 2000 years ago from the fragmentation caused by climate change 500 years before, they did so at least partly thanks to forest animals. As ever with Alex, poo is involved, on this occasion chimp poo. We can thank it for the spread of oil palm across West Africa, it seems. Chimps and others seed poopers may, alas, not be so helpful for the forest’s recovery from the current, anthropogenically caused climate change.
Nibbles: Oz wine atlas, Microbiome vault, Guerrilla breeding, Seed relief bibliography, Food archaeology, Seed producers, Marmalade
- The future of Australian wine in maps.
- A Svalbard for the human microbiome?
- Plant breeders on the edge of the mainstream.
- From FAO, a bibliography on seed systems and seed relief.
- Book review: The Archaeology of Food: Identity, Politics, and Ideology in the Prehistoric and Historic Past.
- Training seed producer groups can help their non-member neighbours too.
- There will be marmalade for tea. But, spoiler alert, it might not be what you think.
Nibbles: Mexico CC, Europe CC, Andean CC, CSA, Seeds, GIAHS, China genebank, Maize domestication, Coffee history, Conservation book
- Interactive website on bioclimatic corridors in Mexico. Bits don’t work, though.
- Interactive website on climate analogues for Europe.
- How Andean farmers are coping with the kind of changes mapped above.
- Oh dear, climate smart agriculture is a myth anyway.
- But saving seeds isn’t, thankfully.
- Still not enough linkage with the GIAHS, though, but maybe this course will fix that.
- Maybe start with peafowl? China shows us how.
- How maize became a staple: quite early, and quite quickly, basically.
- Not much coffee in early English coffeehouses. Amsterdam’s coffeeshops unavailable for comment.
- Open-access magnum opus: Conservation Research, Policy and Practice.
Brainfood: Stress, Peasants’ rights, Maize domestication, Plant diversity, Teff evaluation, Red clover diversity, WTP, AnGR cryo, Sheep history, Population & biodiversity, Planet proofing, Cassava map
- Rapid detection of stressed agricultural environments in Africa under climatic change 2000–2050 using agricultural resource indices and a hotspot mapping approach. Even some coldspots will turn hot.
- The UN Declaration on Peasants’ Rights (UNDROP): Is Article 19 on seed rights adequately balancing intellectual property rights and the right to food? What do you think?
- The genetic architecture of the maize progenitor, teosinte, and how it was altered during maize domestication. Domestication worked on lots and lots of really small-effect QTLs.
- Areas of plant diversity — What do we know? Quite a lot, actually.
- Current and projected eco-geographic adaptation and phenotypic diversity of Ethiopian teff (Eragrostis teff) across its cultivation range. Genebank collection thoroughly evaluated. Genebank unavailable for comment.
- Population structure and genetic diversity in red clover (Trifolium pratense L.) germplasm. Genotyping shows 4 geographic groups, with some linked phenotypic differences.
- ‘Warehouse’ or research centre? Analyzing public preferences for conservation, pre-breeding and characterization activities at the Czech genebank. Research centre, but only up to a point.
- Pollen Cryopreservation for Plant Breeding and Genetic Resources Conservation. Gotta wonder what the public preference for conserving pollen might be.
- The recent state of cryopreservation techniques for ex-situ gene conservation and breeding purposes in small ruminants: A review. Oocytes and embryos need more work than pollen.
- Archaeogenetic analysis of Neolithic sheep from Anatolia suggests a complex demographic history since domestication. Domestication bottleneck, followed by diversity increase due to admixture. Too late to cryo, alas.
- A systematic review of biodiversity and demographic change: A misinterpreted relationship? High human population numbers are usually bad for biodiversity, but not everywhere and not always.
- A re-boot of tropical agriculture benefits food production, rural economies, health, social justice and the environment. Plant cool species on degraded farmland. Especially where human population density is high?
- CassavaMap, a fine-resolution disaggregation of cassava production and harvested area in Africa in 2014. Always good to have the next crop production map.