- Progress toward the identification and stacking of crucial domestication traits in pennycress. Thank goodness it’s closely related to Arabidopsis.
- Sixty years of tracking conservation progress using the World Database on Protected Areas. Will increasingly expand to informally protected ares and link to other databases.
- Evaluating the impacts of protected areas on human well-being across the developing world. Pretty positive impacts for communities living near protected areas, with some tourism.
- Does oil palm agriculture help alleviate poverty? A multidimensional counterfactual assessment of oil palm development in Indonesia. Not in remote, mainly subsistence villages. So I guess that means the best outcomes come from oil palm plantations near protected areas?
- Perspective: What Does Stunting Really Mean? A Critical Review of the Evidence. Not as much as some think, but not nothing.
- Synchronized failure of global crop production. Lower production synchrony within crops, but higher among crops, meaning calorie production very vulnerable to climate change.
- Comparative analysis of perennial and annual Phaseolus seed nutrient concentrations. Ca, Cu, Fe, Mg, Mn, and P higher in wild annuals.
- Urine salts elucidate Early Neolithic animal management at Aşıklı Höyük, Turkey. May show the transition from hunting caprines to keeping them penned up about 10,000 years ago outside the Fertile Crescent.
- Cooked starchy food in hearths ca. 120 kya and 65 kya (MIS 5e and MIS 4) from Klasies River Cave, South Africa. Earliest evidence of parenchyma as food, apparently.
- Phenotypic variation of cassava root traits and their responses to drought. Phancy phenotyping.
- Conventional land‐use intensification reduces species richness and increases production: A global meta‐analysis. Especially in mid-intensity systems, but in low- and high-intensity systems you can get closer to win-wins.
- Projecting impacts of global climate and land‐use scenarios on plant biodiversity using compositional‐turnover modelling. All the intensification in the world is not going to help if climate change isn’t curbed.
- Whole genomes and transcriptomes reveal adaptation and domestication of pistachio. Salinity tolerance related to jasmonic acid synthesis pathway.
Brainfood: African rice domestication, Ancient aliens, Durum landraces, Horticultural landraces, Breeding double, Pollinator research, Sacred forests, Traditional Hawaiian ag, Conserving tomatoes, Mapping impacts, Rewilding, Economic growth, Aquaculture impacts, Phenotyping colours
- The complex geography of domestication of the African rice Oryza glaberrima. Domesticated in multiple places, and the formerly putative ancestor population unlikely to be so.
- Prehistoric cereal foods of southeastern Europe: An archaeobotanical exploration. Including Panicum millet as far back as the Bronze Age, interestingly.
- Genetic diversity in Ethiopian Durum Wheat (Triticum turgidum var durum) inferred from phenotypic variations. Some landraces are better than some improved varieties, sometimes, somewhere.
- Editorial: Rediscovering Local Landraces: Shaping Horticulture for the Future. See above.
- Enhancing the rate of genetic gain in public-sector plant breeding programs: lessons from the breeder’s equation. What do they have to say about the genetic diversity term, I hear you ask? “For many species, the primary value of exotic genetic variation is the identification and deployment of rare alleles with large effects that can be introduced into elite breeding programs via a thoughtful implementation of marker-assisted selection…”
- The many‐faced Janus of plant breeding. It’s more than just genetics.
- The need for coordinated transdisciplinary research infrastructures for pollinator conservation and crop pollination resilience. Mine historical data and mobilize the citizenry.
- Human disturbance impacts the integrity of sacred church forests, Ethiopia. Even the small forests are important.
- The potential of indigenous agricultural food production under climate change in Hawaiʻi. They could have fed today’s population, and could still do so.
- Managing plant genetic resources using low and ultra-low temperature storage: a case study of tomato. Nothing is perfect.
- A spatial framework for ex-ante impact assessment of agricultural technologies. I do love a map, but I have to wonder if you can have too much of a good thing.
- Why we should let rewilding be wild and biodiverse. Well, why not?
- Increasing impacts of land use on biodiversity and carbon sequestration driven by population and economic growth. The 2008 financial crisis was good for biodiversity.
- Rapid growth in greenhouse gas emissions from the adoption of industrial-scale aquaculture. Crab ponds are worse than paddy fields for greenhouse gas emissions.
- ColourQuant: a high-throughput technique to extract and quantify colour phenotypes from plant images. Remind me to tell you my story about characterizing the colours of a taro collection in Vanuatu.
- Phenotypic analysis of leaf colours from the USDA, ARS sweetpotato (Ipomoea batatas) germplasm collection. Never mind, this story is better.
Brainfood: Salinity tolerance, Intensification & sparing, CWR templates, Cacao identity, Soybean CWR, Soybean & CC, Cassava adoption, Indian cauliflower, Bambara groundnut, CC breeding, NUS, Banana access, Enset
- Salt stress under the scalpel – dissecting the genetics of salt tolerance. Could domesticate naturally salt-tolerant species and then breed for agronomic performance.
- Exploring the relationship between agricultural intensification and changes in cropland areas in the US. Higher yields not necessarily associated with less agricultural expansion.
- New tools for crop wild relative conservation planning. Lots of templates.
- Genetic identity and origin of “Piura Porcelana”—a fine-flavored traditional variety of cacao (Theoborma cacao) from the Peruvian Amazon. Similar but not identical to Nacional from Ecuador.
- Cytogenetics and genetic introgression from wild relatives in soybean. Intersubgeneric crossability barrier finally broken.
- Increased temperatures may safeguard the nutritional quality of crops under future elevated CO2 concentrations. Swings and roundabouts.
- Poverty reduction effects of agricultural technology adoption: the case of improved cassava varieties in Nigeria. 1.62 million lifted out of poverty, give or take, depending on the breaks.
- Frequent introgression of European cauliflowers in the present day cultivated Indian cauliflowers and role of Indian genotypes in the evolution of tropical cauliflower. More evidence of interdependence, if any were needed.
- Bambara Groundnut is a Climate-Resilient Crop: How Could a Drought-Tolerant and Nutritious Legume Improve Community Resilience in the Face of Climate Change? Isn’t it obvious?
- Adaption to Climate Change: Climate Adaptive Breeding of Maize, Wheat and Rice. “The good news is that there is significant genetic variation for heat and drought/submergence tolerance in the global maize, wheat and rice gene banks.”
- Crop Diversification Through a Wider Use of Underutilised Crops: A Strategy to Ensure Food and Nutrition Security in the Face of Climate Change. And a good one too. The last three items are from the same edited volume, which looks like should be worth getting: Sustainable Solutions for Food Security.
- Seed degeneration of banana planting materials: strategies for improved farmer access to healthy seed. Decentralize.
- Enset in Ethiopia: a poorly characterized but resilient starch staple. Maybe the above will work for enset too, but it will need better collections.
Nibbles: I say potato, CATIE genebank, Wat, Teff war, Digitizing collections, Black History Month, Crop stats
- Genebanks, crop wild relatives, friends, even a cool title — this one has it all: The New Potato.
- Latest on the CATIE seed collection.
- The wonder of Ethiopian food.
- Which I guess can include teff again now.
- Digitizing the Smithsonian — fast.
- George Washington Carver celebrated.
- Oh look, there’s a new version of SPAM. Let the GISsing begin.
Nibbles: Cherokee genebank, Community genebanks, Fruit genebank, CGIAR genebanks, CWR pre-breeding, Ethiopian sacred groves, UK animal ark
- Cherokee Nation seedbank goes online.
- Does that mean it is a biodiversity eden?
- New Grewia genebank in India. No word on community involvement.
- Meanwhile, at the CGIAR genebanks…
- Pre-breeding using CWR, some even from genebanks: finger millet, eggplant.
- Yeah, yeah, it’s not just about genebanks.
- Or maybe it is.