- Unexpected Diversity during Community Succession in the Apple Flower Microbiome. Could be important in disease management.
- Plant Tissue Culture: A Useful Measure for the Screening of Salt Tolerance in Plants. But lots of different ways to do it.
- Fisheries: Does catch reflect abundance? Some. But probably not enough. Here’s the industry spin. And the NY Times does a number on it.
- Plant-Pollinator Interactions over 120 Years: Loss of Species, Co-Occurrence and Function. Extinctions and phenological shifts have occurred, but the system has shown resilience. It is unlikely, however, to continue to do so.
- Wild Pollinators Enhance Fruit Set of Crops Regardless of Honey Bee Abundance. Don’t you sometimes wish titles left something to the imagination? NPR breaks it down for ya, but doesn’t add much to the title.
- Continental estimates of forest cover and forest cover changes in the dry ecosystems of Africa between 1990 and 2000. About 20 Mha of forest loss, not 34 Mha. Still too much, though. But how did FAO get it so wrong?
- Robustness and Strategies of Adaptation among Farmer Varieties of African Rice (Oryza glaberrima) and Asian Rice (Oryza sativa) across West Africa. Local varieties can scale out. And should be used in breeding.
- Genetic and life-history changes associated with fisheries-induced population collapse. Phenotypic changes during Eurasian perch Baltic Sea fisheries collapse could be evolution, but when you look at the genetics it looks more like immigration of unadapted interlopers. Which might be bad for recovery.
- Variable activation of immune response by quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa Willd.) prolamins in celiac disease. Quinoa may be gluten-free, but it can still give you grief, and some varieties are far worse than others.
- Social exchange and vegetative propagation: An untold story of British potted plants. It’s artificial selection, Jim, but not as we know it.
- Wheat Cultivar Performance and Stability between No-Till and Conventional Tillage Systems in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. Tested 21 cultivars for performance under late-planted no-till system and — guess what? — performance varied.
- Genetic diversity and structure in Asian native goat analyzed by newly developed SNP markers. They originated in W Asia, and then admixtured (admixed?) in the E to different extents. Yeah, I thought we knew that already too, but scientists gotta make a living.
- A Bountiful Harvest: Genomic Insights into Crop Domestication Phenotypes. The mutations that underpinned domestication came in all kinds of shapes and sizes. Like this one in maize, for example.
Nibbles: Guatemala, Burundi, Bees, LANSA, Moringa, Sorghum domestication, Coffee rust, Zambian rhinos
- The USDA is plugging its Atlas of Crop Wild Relatives in Guatemala. So we’ll plug our post about it from November 2011. And ask again: where’s Paraguay?
- The Social Life of Beans in Burundi is a tour-de-force. I can never get enough of informal seed systems, especially from people who live in them.
- And a similar sort of thing on okra. What’s gumbo without it?
- Today’s scary bee decline story. With extra buzz.
- CGIAR comes in for some stick over the insidious view and cunning logic of “Leveraging Agriculture for Nutrition in South Asia (LANSA)”. I couldn’t possibly comment (and CG probably won’t).
- Oh boy! Global Moringa Get-togethers! In India!
- Sorghum domestication in Sudan: earlier, and less uncertain, than before.
- BBC piece on the new outbreak of coffee rust in Central America. Where are the resistant varieties?
- Head of Kew’s MSB tracks rhinos. Well, someone has to.
Nibbles: Fruit hunters, Organic interview, Hunger review, Jamaican seeds, Project evaluation, Horse domestication, Maize then and now, Impact studies, Seed kits, Amazon ranching, Habitat restoration, Native potato manual, SRI
- CBC documentary on collectors of fruit diversity. Anyone seen it?
- Matthew Dillon of Seed Matters on organic seeds.
- IFAD bigwig deconstructs Conway’s One Billion Hungry. Great summary of 400+ pages. Diversified farming systems are in there, kinda sorta.
- Jamaican bill calls on someone or other to “maximize internal intra and inter-species variation to boost benefits.” They need to fix the title too. It has something to do with the ITPGRFA.
- How to evaluate fisheries and aquaculture projects. Nothing in there about the importance of genetic diversity in these systems, or indeed their possible effects on the biodiversity around them.
- Sculptures of horses with tack from middle of Saudi Arabian desert may push date of domestication way back.
- Maize a staple, not a ceremonial condiment, in early Peruvian coastal civilizations. And also in Timor Leste for that matter. One does worry about those local landraces, though.
- Latest examples of impact of investments in agricultural R&D from EIARD. Includes African indigenous veggies!
- AVRDC sends vegetable seed kits to Mali. Including indigenous species, but apparently only improved varieties.
- Anthropologist goes to Amazon, learns not to look down his nose at ranchers.
- Millennium Seed Bank helping to restore Falkland habitats. That sort of thing can be a business, you know?
- Manual for the conservation and improvement of Chiloe’s native potatoes. Should have something similar for maize in Timor, eh? And African indigenous veggies too?
- You remember yesterday’s Nibble about SRI? Here’s more oil on the fire.
Nibbles: UK horticulture funding, AVRDC, Biofortification, SRI debate, Stressed bees, Nutrient decline, Beneficial viruses, DNA for dummies, Chaffey, Cow genebank, Organic network
- For UK horticulturalists in need of cash. Wonder if that includes the rosemary collection.
- I’m pretty sure it doesn’t include AVRDC.
- Who would no doubt agree with Mark Lynas that “No-one disputes that a balanced and nutritionally-adequate diet is the best long-term solution to vitamin A deficiency and malnutrition in general.” And be as puzzled as the rest of us for the relative lack of funding for research on such a diet.
- A discussion of why mainstream agricultural science hasn’t got the message across about SRI, courtesy of Facebook. Yeah well, the whole concept of basing interventions on, you know, evidence, is not exactly mainstream. Just ask the balanced and nutritionally-adequate diet guys.
- Bees are stressed out, the poor things.
- Creative Commons graphs on changes in vegetable nutrient content.
- Not all plant viruses are bad.
- Pat Heslop-Harrison talks DNA, with his usual extraordinary fluency, from 11 mins in.
- Plant Cuttings! Everything from the botany of food to transcription factors for C4 photosynthesis.
- Cow genebank proposed.
- IFOAM gets a TIPI. Vandana Shiva no doubt ecstatic.
Nibbles: Svalbard, Wayne Smith, Salinity, Tasty sorghum, NUS conference, Med collecting, Income and diversity, Agricultural packages
- Canadian genebank sends seeds to Svalbard.
- And Plant Breeder of the Year goes to… Bet you he used the genebank a lot.
- Dubai told to grow local plants to save water. There’s a genebank for that.
- More digestible sorghum down to one gene. Probably came from a genebank.
- A conference on neglected and underutilized species. And the genebanks that conserve them?
- Collecting on Mediterranean islands for Kew’s genebank. Nice gig if you can get it.
- Richer farmers more likely to adopt improved varieties. To him that has… So I guess genebanks should go to the poorer farmers to collect landraces? Always wondered about that.
- Can I help it if everything came up genebanks today?
- Well, almost everything. Agricultural packages unwrapped by the Archaeobotanist.