- It isn’t rice, but it is wild. And threatened, by disease, dams and climate change. h/t Sustainable Nutrition.
- Food forests. All you can eat blog post, with video goodness.
- Archaeology International goes more-or-less open access. Read all about The Early Rice Project, among other treats.
Brainfood: Cassava in Colombia, Tubers in Peru, Breadfruit diversity, Hominins and elephants, Evolution, Domestication, Mongolian sheep, Roads, Econutrition, South Asia food composition
- Informal “Seed” Systems and the Management of Gene Flow in Traditional Agroecosystems: The Case of Cassava in Cauca, Colombia. Farmers move cassava around a lot.
- Ecological and socio-cultural factors influencing in situ conservation of crop diversity by traditional Andean households in Peru. Farmers should be supported in moving tubers around more.
- Nutritional and morphological diversity of breadfruit (Artocarpus, Moraceae): Identification of elite cultivars for food security. There’s a lot of it.
- Man the Fat Hunter: The Demise of Homo erectus and the Emergence of a New Hominin Lineage in the Middle Pleistocene (ca. 400 kyr) Levant. Disappearance of elephant led to replacement of Homo erectus. Quite a difference from the more recent hominin-elephant dynamic.
- Fitness consequences of plants growing with siblings: reconciling kin selection, niche partitioning and competitive ability. All agriculture is about reconciling kin selection.
- Cultivation and domestication had multiple origins: arguments against the core area hypothesis for the origins of agriculture in the Near East. Revisionism rules.
- Tracing genetic differentiation of Chinese Mongolian sheep using microsatellites. Five populations clustered by fancy science into, ahem, five populations.
- Road connectivity, population, and crop production in Sub-Saharan Africa. Fancy science reveals better roads would be good for agriculture. Hell, my mother-in-law could have told them that.
- Econutrition: Preventing Malnutrition with Agrodiversity Interventions. Home gardening is the way to go.
- Carotenoid and retinol composition of South Asian foods commonly consumed in the UK. Palak paneer is not just good, it’s good for you.
Nibbles: Maize and beans, Kenyan stories, Mesopotamia, Rice Domestication, Food economics, Pest control
- The climate change boys have been looking for places where maize and beans will, and will not, thrive.
- An Australian journalist reports from Kenya, courtesy of The Crawford Fund.
- Rewriting the metanarrative of The Fertile Crescent.
- Dorian Fuller goes on to examine recent papers on rice and millet domestication … so we don’t have to.
- Back40 previews Tyler Cowan’s new book An Economist Gets Lunch: New Rules for Everyday Foodies. Can I wait until April?
- How to control stemborers and striga with agrobiodiversity. Undated. Is it new?
- Arche Noah revitalized? Again, is this new? C’mon people, date those suckers.
Brainfood: Early farmers, Ecological restoration, IPRs, Soil bacterial diversity, Perenniality, Carrot diversity, Earthworm mapping
- Ancient DNA from an Early Neolithic Iberian population supports a pioneer colonization by first farmers. People, not just crops, moved.
- Genetic consequences of using seed mixtures in restoration: A case study of a wetland plant Lychnis flos-cuculi. After a few generations of use for seed production, it’s best to abandon ex situ stocks and go back to the wild populations.
- Creative Commons licenses and the non-commercial condition: Implications for the re-use of biodiversity information. It’s complicated. I wonder if the multi-headed hounds who guard the gates to GBDBH are aware of this. Here’s a blog post.
- Is diversification history of maize influencing selection of soil bacteria by roots? Kinda.
- A horizon scan of global conservation issues for 2012. Perennial cereals make the cut.
- How pristine are tropical forests? An ecological perspective on the pre-Columbian human footprint in Amazonia and implications for contemporary conservation. It doesn’t matter.
- Genetic diversity of carrot (Daucus carota L.) cultivars revealed by analysis of SSR loci. Western and Asian groups, the latter more diverse, because of landraces. But 88 accessions does seem a bit few. And no wilds.
- Mapping of earthworm distribution for the British Isles and Eire highlights the under-recording of an ecologically important group. 28 species! But many gaps. No diversity map. Will send them DIVA-GIS for Christmas.
Brainfood: OSP adoption, Milk quality, Passport data quality, Historical collections, Sweet potato domestication, African veggies, Baobab diversity and domestication, Cassava diversity, Strawberry breeding, Barley GWA, Pest symbionts, Maize diversity and climate change
- A large-scale intervention to introduce orange sweet potato in rural Mozambique increases vitamin A intakes among children and women. Just 1 year of training worked just as well as a higher intensity intervention (3 years) in increasing OSP and vitamin A intake by younger children, older children and women, and decreasing prevalence of inadequate vitamin A intakes. OSP represented about half of all sweet potatoes consumed so I guess there was not complete replacement of local varieties.
- Composition of milk from minor dairy animals and buffalo breeds: a biodiversity perspective. There are significant interbreed and inter-species differences. Dromedary milk is closest to cow milk, mare and donkey milk maybe the healthiest, but moose milk is the one I’d like to try.
- Quality indicators for passport data in ex situ genebanks. That would be the genebanks in Eurisco. Verdict: not bad, but could do better. Most variation in quality is among institutes.
- Exploring the population genetics of genebank and historical landrace varieties. Old samples of dead seeds of 4 crops in Swedish museum jars more genetically variable than genebank accessions, but it’s not the genebank’s fault. And at least their seeds are still alive. Also no genetic correspondence between geographically matched museum and genebank samples.
- Combining chloroplast and nuclear microsatellites to investigate origin and dispersal of New World sweet potato landraces. Two areas of domestication, probably from a single wild progenitor species: lowland NW South America and lowland Central America/Caribbean. Genetic differences between these 2 genepools not accompanied by morphological differences, but then again nobody’s looked properly, and the current descriptors are useless anyway.
- The significance of African vegetables in ensuring food security for South Africa’s rural poor. Their huge potential is being thwarted by evil extensionists. Ok, but don’t we need to move beyond that?
- Comparative study on baobab fruit morphological variation between western and south-eastern Africa: opportunities for domestication. Hang on a minute, aren’t there a million factsheets about all this?
- Marriage exchanges, seed exchanges, and the dynamics of manioc diversity. Kinship structures determine cassava diversity patterns in Gabon. Matrilineal societies have more diversity.
- Interspecific hybridization of diploids and octoploids in strawberry. You get pentaploid and tetraploid plants.
- Genome wide association analyses for drought tolerance related traits in barley (Hordeum vulgare L.). Ok, deep breath. Over 200 accessions, both wild and cultivated, from 30 countries, so quite variable, but also structured. There were some QTLs that differed between dry and wet sites, but they didn’t explain much phenotypic variation, and they couldn’t be related to previous work. So GWA not much use, probably because of population structure. But couldn’t that have been predicted? And isn’t it possible to do something about structure in the analysis?
- Population genetics of beneficial heritable symbionts. Of insects, that is. Mostly proteobacteria. So my question is, could somehow attacking the symbionts form the basis of a pest management strategy?
- Projecting the effects of climate change on the distribution of maize races and their wild relatives in Mexico. Many races and wild relatives are predicted to shift in geographic distribution. Unless of course agronomy intervenes. Teocinte taxa should be collected.