- The Pacific pushes out its taros.
- China holds on to its pigs.
- Vanuatu preserves its bananas.
- The world talks about yams in particular. And crop breeding in general.
- How Britain got its monkey puzzles.
- Bangladesh goes for mola culture. But not only.
- Australia puts money into beer.
- France gets into the whole baobab factsheet thing, but with a video twist.
- Virginia makes wine. With infographic goodness.
- UK tries to slow down its food.
- Canada barcodes everything.
Nibbles: Ug99, Heirloom & wild tomatoes, Opium, Healthy flavours, Quinoa descriptors, Wild yak community conservation, Phenotyping facility, Tree app, ABS & EU, C4, Barley in Ethiopia, Chinese coffee
- Not totally wild genes protect wheat from Ug99.
- Not really wild Texas Wild tomato brings Texan back to gardening. These in Peru are wild though.
- Speaking of gardening, here’s Michael Pollan on his struggles with opium.
- Wild, healthy fruit flavours becoming more popular on the soft drink market, but not clear to what extent they will come from actual plants, wild or otherwise. You know, plants with yield variation and other inconveniences. Plants that some people rely on for nutrition, by the way.
- Descriptors for quinoa, including the wild species. And more, much more.
- I wonder if there are descriptors for wild yaks.
- New UK facility for phenotyping plants, including wild ones, I’m sure.
- And if those wild UK plants are trees, you can use this app to identify them, before phenotyping them. Assuming you can dig them up and squeeze them into the new facility. Anyway, maybe one of them will be European Tree of the Year.
- Of course, if you wanted access to the genetic resources of such trees, you’d have to deal with the Nagoya Protocol, which the EU is getting to grips with, don’t worry.
- Not many C4 species among UK trees, I guess.
- Teff is C4, but that isn’t stopping people trying to replace it with barley in injira.
- Next thing you know the Chinese will be swapping tea for coffee. No, wait.
Nibbles: Tea nomenclature, Medicinal plants, Robert Fortune, Gender gap, Japanese women farmers, AnGR conservation, Herbarium databases, India & Africa
- Tea diversity 101.
- Tea is medicinal, isn’t it? Certainly some other plants introduced to the West by the same person are.
- I could tell you all about the gender gap in tea cultivation in Kenya.
- And I bet there’s one in Japan too.
- Not to mention in livestock-keeping. But I don’t suppose that will affect (ILRI’s) plans for a
Kenyanlivestock genebank. - Crowdsourcing herbarium data. Maybe there’s some specimens of wild tea species in there…
- India reaches out to Africa. ICRISAT involved. Debal Deb, probably not so much. Chai, anyone?
Brainfood: Maize domestication, Restoration success, Rare species, Pollinator loss, Diversity and productivity, Cacao/coffee & ecosystem services, Brazilian coffee, GM cotton benefits
- Genetics and Consequences of Crop Domestication. The domestication bottleneck has consequences.
- Evaluating Ecological Restoration Success: A Review of the Literature. There’s more of it going on. Evaluation, that is. Which is good. But still mainly from the USA and Australia, and not enough of the socioeconomic kind.
- Rare Species Support Vulnerable Functions in High-Diversity Ecosystems. Ecosystems are distinctive because of their rare species.
- Environmental factors driving the effectiveness of European agri-environmental measures in mitigating pollinator loss — a meta-analysis. We know how to lessen, but not how to mitigate, loss of pollinators.
- Experimental evidence that evolutionarily diverse assemblages result in higher productivity. And the more distantly related the species, the higher the productivity gain.
- A global meta-analysis of the biodiversity and ecosystem service benefits of coffee and cacao agroforestry. Agroforests better than plantations, but forests best of all.
- Coefficient of Parentage in Coffea arabica L. Cultivars Grown in Brazil. Be afraid.
- Genetically Modified Crops and Food Security. Turns out GM cotton has increased the income and thus improved the diets of adopting Indian farmers. Well, maybe.
Brainfood: Wild yeast, Sorbus evolution, Taro leaf blight, Vegetable sesame, Phast phenotyping, US CWR, Risk, Citizen science, GMOs, European meadow diversity, Hedysarum diversity, Pineapple diversity
- Introducing a New Breed of Wine Yeast: Interspecific Hybridisation between a Commercial Saccharomyces cerevisiae Wine Yeast and Saccharomyces mikatae. The future of wine?
- Breeding systems, hybridization and continuing evolution in Avon Gorge Sorbus. You had me at “Avon Gorge, Bristol, UK, is a world ‘hotspot’ for Sorbus diversity.”
- Taro leaf blight — A threat to global food security. Yes, but we have the technology…
- Agromorphological characterization of Sesamum radiatum (Schum. and Thonn.), a neglected and underutilized species of traditional leafy vegetable of great importance in Benin. Yes, but we need the technology…
- Phenoscope: an automated large-scale phenotyping platform offering high spatial homogeneity. Somebody mention technology?
- An Inventory of Crop Wild Relatives of the United States. More than you’d think.
- Empirical Test of an Agricultural Landscape Model. The Importance of Farmer Preference for Risk Aversion and Crop Complexity. It’s not just about profit. At least in the UK.
- Using citizen scientists to measure an ecosystem service nationwide. Bullshit. No, really, it’s about the decomposition of cow pats.
- Intragenesis and cisgenesis as alternatives to transgenic crop development. Spingenesis.
- Managing biodiversity rich hay meadows in the EU: a comparison of Swedish and Romanian grasslands. Both need more input from local knowledge.
- Mediterranean Hedysarum phylogeny by transferable microsatellites from Medicago. Wait, Sulla? What happened to Hedysarum?
- Polymorphic microsatellite markers in pineapple (Ananas comosus (L.) Merrill). And?