Domestication

June 26, 2013June 28, 2013

Ancient American agrobiodiversity podcasts galore, and more

No sooner had I digested (as it were) Jeremy’s latest offering, that I ran across two other recent podcasts also on subjects related to ancient American agriculture. Archaeologist Dr David Lentz discusses the Pompeii of Central America in the latest Academic Minute. And environmental journalist Sam Eaton talks about the resurgence of amaranth in Mexico. Never rains but it pours.

Well, since it’s raining so hard, let me throw in a couple of related tidbits. If you’ve got a paper on amaranth or any other similarly downtrodden crop, you have until 15 July to put in an abstract for the 3rd International Conference on Neglected and Underutilized Species, to be held in Accra, Ghana on 25-27 September 2013. And if you’re Brazilian, and you’re interested in studying agrobiodiversity in Latin America, including NUS no doubt, you have until June 30 to apply for a studentship. And finally there is the IX Simposio Internacional de Recursos Genéticos para América Latina y el Caribe in El Salvador in November.

LATER: Talk about zeitgeist. Here’s another little something for the weekend for all you NUS aficionados: there’s a special issue of Sustainability in the works on “Underutilized Plant Species: Leveraging Food and Nutritional Security, and Income Generation.” Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 November 2013.

June 24, 2013June 23, 2013

Brainfood: Pear history, Markets & biodiversity, Conserving small populations, Niche & range, Sustainability in the US, Production forecasts, Sheep differences

The Pear in History, Literature, Popular Culture, and Art. An oldie, but worth reading just for the analogy between the pear connoisseur and the opera aficionado.
Effects of market integration on agricultural biodiversity in a tropical frontier. Darien, Panama. Roads are bad for crop diversity, of the interspecific kind at least.
Conservation genetics and the persistence and translocation of small populations: bighorn sheep populations as examples. Bigger is definitely better.
Niche breadth predicts geographical range size: a general ecological pattern. Specialist species tend to have small range sizes, making them doubly vulnerable. Trebly so if they have small populations too, I guess (see above).
Sustainability and innovation in staple crop production in the US Midwest. …depends on on-farm diversity, and here’s three things you can do to promote it, because it ain’t getting any better: collect statistics, redirect subsidies, and think beyond peak yield. Ah but wait, you may have to change the IP system. As you were.
Yield Trends Are Insufficient to Double Global Crop Production by 2050. For rice, wheat, maize and soybean, current rates of yield increase, if they continue, which I suppose is a big if, what with climate change and all, would mean about 50% production increases by 2050, rather than the supposedly needed 100%.
Genome-Wide Genetic Diversity and Differentially Selected Regions among Suffolk, Rambouillet, Columbia, Polypay, and Targhee Sheep. Suffolk is different from the others, which we already knew were related. Ah, but now we know where exactly in the genome the differences are.

June 19, 2013June 19, 2013

Dog domestication controversy growls away

Awesome, by @ewencallaway RT @mammuthus: Nice summary of recent research into dog evolution http://t.co/sZ92QM5wt4 (h/t @paleogenomics)

— Ed Yong is not here (@edyong209) June 18, 2013

Scientists investigating the transformation of wolves into dogs are behaving a bit like the animals they study, as disputes roil among those using genetics to understand dog domestication.

Sound familiar? Remember the chicken story? It’s a genomic jungle out there.

LATER: A jungle that goes way back.

June 13, 2013June 12, 2013

Nibbles: Tree domestication, Sacred groves, Solomons aquaculture, Bees and diversity

Cultivate medicinal trees to save them. Oh, and provide medicines.
Or you could harvest them sustainably from sacred forests?
Reef fished out? Aquaculture to the rescue. Sounds a bit like the aquatic equivalent of the above, no? But do they have sea cucumbers and their poop in those inland ponds?
Growing diverse crops good for bees, good for crops. Buckwheat diverse enough for ya?

June 10, 2013June 26, 2013

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.