- Archaeological expansions in tropical South America during the late Holocene: Assessing the role of demic diffusion. Some agricultural diffusion in lowland South America was the movement of ideas rather than people.
- The origins of Amazonian landscapes: Plant cultivation, domestication and the spread of food production in tropical South America. Where did the farming people and/or ideas move from? The sub-Andean montane forest of NW South America and the shrub savannahs and seasonal forests of SW Amazonia.
- Genetic Diversity, Nitrogen Fixation, and Water Use Efficiency in a Panel of Honduran Common Bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) Landraces and Modern Genotypes. Landraces showed better N fixation, but lower yields, than modern varieties.
- Maize genotypes with deep root systems tolerate salt stress better than those with shallow root systems during early growth. Ok, but? There’s always a but.
- Challenges for Ex Situ Conservation of Wild Bananas: Seeds Collected in Papua New Guinea Have Variable Levels of Desiccation Tolerance. Avoid the basal end of the infructescence. Among other things.
- Detection of banana plants and their major diseases through aerial images and machine learning methods: A case study in DR Congo and Republic of Benin. Yeah but can you apply it to collecting the wild relatives?
- Genetic and genomic resources for finger millet improvement: opportunities for advancing climate-smart agriculture. No way this can be called neglected any longer. But is it still under-utilized?
- Genotyping-by-Sequencing to Unlock Genetic Diversity and Population Structure in White Yam (Dioscorea rotundata Poir.). More landrace variation within countries than among.
- BRIDGE – A Visual Analytics Web Tool for Barley Genebank Genomics. Do white yam next?
- Pedigree analysis of pre-breeding efforts in Trifolium spp. germplasm in New Zealand. Not a huge number of parents have been used, but reasonable diversity in most species.
- Pleistocene climate changes, and not agricultural spread, accounts for range expansion and admixture in the dominant grassland species Lolium perenne L. Lots more unused diversity out there. For now.
- IUCN Red List and the value of integrating genetics. Applying some genetic rules of thumb make some endangered species even more so.
- Variation in Seed Metabolites between Two Indica Rice Accessions Differing in Seed Longevity. Candidate biochemical indicators of impending seed death detected.
- Sustainability strategies by companies in the global coffee sector. They are close to non-existent.
- Camel Genetic Resources Conservation through Tourism: A Key Sociocultural Approach of Camelback Leisure Riding. Camel rides could be used for conservation, but they’ll have to deliver more than just conservation.
Nibbles: Insurance edition
- Biodiversity is insurance, says insurance company.
- Especially biodiversity of fruits and vegetables.
- Research by CGIAR into how best to use that insurance generates a 10:1 return on investment. Kind of. Covers breeding et al., but not genebanks. Sigh.
- Professor Claire Kremen is awarded the Volvo Environment Prize 2020 for research on how to protect that insurance while feeding the world.
- People have been fiddling with that insurance for longer than we thought, archeologists say.
Nibbles: Crop mapping, Sampling, Rice domestication, Coffee rust podcast, Wool dogs
- Crop-Climate Suitability Mapping. Yes, another one. I feel a proper post coming on.
- Tweet from Sean Hoban on ex situ sampling strategies. I feel a proper post coming on.
- Proper blog post explains a really complicated rice domestication paper in about a page.
- Proper podcast from Jeremy on, among other things, why coffee leaf rust is not why the Brits drink tea.
- Not sure if this is blog post, but it’s a really good example of weaving together (see what I did there?) different pieces of work on the wool dogs (sic) of the Pacific NW.
Nibbles: Seeds4all, Seed keepers, African cattle book, Slavery & food podcast, Fonio cooking, Rabbit domestication
- Seeds4all website launched to help make seeds available to all.
- Why, you ask? Read this.
- Beautiful book on the diversity of African cattle from ILRI.
- The bloody history of food.
- Decolonize your diet with fonio.
- Domestic rabbits are pretty wild.
Brainfood: Sorghum lodging, GR wheat, Wild potato core, Wild tomato structure, Protected areas, Biodiversity agreements, Malt archaeology, Hittite archeology, Seed traders, Peasant networks, Seed storage, Mesoamerican crop origins, Intensification, Cattle breeds, Pig domestication, Rice barcodes, Potato history, Rice spread
- Large-scale genome-wide association study reveals that drought-induced lodging in grain sorghum is associated with plant height and traits linked to carbon remobilisation. To reduce lodging, better to select for stay-green (delayed leaf senescence) than for short stature and lodging resistance per se. Here’s a Twitter thread by one of the authors summarizing the findings.
- Green revolution ‘stumbles’ in a dry environment: Dwarf wheat with Rht genes fails to produce higher grain yield than taller plants under drought. At least it doesn’t lodge, though, right?
- A Core Subset of the ex situ Collection of S. demissum at the US Potato Genebank. From 149 to 38, keeping 96% of all marker diversity.
- Migration through a major Andean ecogeographic disruption as a driver of genotypic and phenotypic diversity in a wild tomato species. I guess if you were going to make a core collection for this you could do worse than sample ecogeographically diverse and isolated spots. Tricky to conserve in situ though.
- DNA barcoding of Oryza: conventional, specific, and super barcodes. 6 hypervariable regions in the chloroplast genome can serve as rice-specific DNA barcodes. Assuming you agree on species concepts in the first place.
- A “Global Safety Net” to reverse biodiversity loss and stabilize Earth’s climate. The 50% of the Earth to save to save the Earth.
- Three Key considerations for biodiversity conservation in multilateral agreements. Plan, model, assign responsibility.
- Mashes to Mashes, Crust to Crust. Presenting a novel microstructural marker for malting in the archaeological record. Aleurone cell breakdown in archaeobotanical remains is a robust indicator of beer-making. I bet they find it everywhere now.
- The agroecology of an early state: new results from Hattusha. Huge underground grain silos, with each container holding grain from multiple sites, which could be evidence of tax-paying. But no word on beer.
- Informal Seed Traders: The Backbone of Seed Business and African Smallholder Seed Supply. Lots of room for engagement, and considerable upside. If I were to pick out just one high-potential intervention, it would be providing training in seed testing.
- Restoring cultivated agrobiodiversity: The political ecology of knowledge networks between local peasant seed groups in France. I’m sure they’re testing their seeds.
- A Protective Role for Accumulated Dry Matter Reserves in Seeds During Desiccation: Implications for Conservation. Cells must have >35% dry matter to be able to withstand desiccation.
- Multiple lines of evidence for the origin of domesticated chili pepper, Capsicum annuum, in Mexico. It looks like we — inexplicably — missed this the first time around. Chilli, maize and beans originated in different parts of Mexico.
- Ecological intensification and diversification approaches to maintain biodiversity, ecosystem services and food production in a changing world. Though you can change one thing at a time, it’s better to redesign the whole system. But is the better the enemy of the good?
- Refining the genetic structure and relationships of European cattle breeds through meta-analysis of worldwide genomic SNP data, focusing on Italian cattle. 2 groups among Italian breeds: North-Central breeds linked to Alpine and Iberian breeds, and Podolian-Sicilian breeds with links to the Balkans.
- The Archaeology of Pig Domestication in Eurasia. Independent domestication in northern Mesopotamia by 7500 BC (extensive management) and China by 6000 BC (maybe intensive); failed to take off in Japan, for interesting reasons.
- Vegetative States: Potatoes, Affordances, and Survival Ecologies. The potato has both helped to underpin and resist state coercion. The Hittites would have worked something out, though, I feel.
- Holocene coastal evolution preceded the expansion of paddy field rice farming. Rice only moved south from the lower Yangtze 2-3000 years ago, once costal land opened up. No word on affordances.