From EurekAlert: “The American Society for Horticultural Science has published multimedia podcast files of 98 horticulture presentations from the 2007 Annual Conference in Scottsdale, Ariz.” Check out, in particular, James Nienhuis of the University of Wisconsin, Dept. of Horticulture, talking about Renaissance art and agrobiodiversity, more specifically vegetable domestication. Wonderful stuff.
International meet on agrobiodiversity
UC Davis is organizing a follow-up to the international symposium held in Aleppo, Syria in 1997 under the name of “The Origins of Agriculture and the Domestication of Crop Plants in the Near East.” Also dedicated to Jack R. Harlan (1917–1998), celebrated agricultural botanist and plant explorer, the 2008 conference is entitled “Biodiversity in Agriculture: Domestication, Evolution, & Sustainability.” If you’re planning to go, how about reporting on the conference for our readers at Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog?
New Tangled Bank
From the latest Tangled Bank blog carnival, a couple of relevant pieces. Felicia gives a personal account of her fascination with honeybees and there’s an account of the domestication of the dog (which I can’t seem to access). Lots more that is interesting, but not relevant to agricultural biodiversity.
Earliest known rice?
It’s late, and I really should get to bed, but I cannot ignore my duty to inform you of a paper just published in Nature. Fire and flood management of coastal swamp enabled first rice paddy cultivation in east China by Y. Zong, Z. Chen, J. B. Innes, C. Chen, Z. Wang and H. Wang describes how, 7,700 years ago, people in the lower reaches of the Yangtze converted brackish swamps into rice paddies that remained pretty productive for a couple of hundred years until the sea upped and swallowed the area. There’s a lot more to be gleaned from the paper, which is probably behind a paywall (I can’t check) but will nevertheless be picked up around the world. I’ll look out for a story in the China Daily tomorrow.
Later … Nothing I could see in the paper here, but the LA Times and National Geographic have more.
How domestication happens
Blog commentary on a paper about serendipitous backyard domestication.