Domestication

July 5, 2023July 5, 2023

Tracing the spread of a map of the spread of the olive

There’s a nice map of the spread of the olive doing the rounds on Twitter.

But where does it come from?

As best as I can make out, the ultimate source seems to be an article on Vivid Maps. All the other maps and illustrations in the article are credited, but this one is not, so I’m thinking the author — Alex — made it him or herself, and a fine job they did too if so.

Where did they get the data? Difficult to say, but there’s a very similar map, though not nearly as nice, in an Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems article entitled Olive Growing in a Time of Change. And that has the following credit (slightly cleaned up, and link added):

Olive diffusion in the Mediterranean Basin. (Adapted from Morettini. 1950. Olivicoltura. REDA, Roma, Italia, by Rallo, L. 2005. In Rallo, L., Barranco, D., Caballero, J. M., Del Río, C., Martín, A., Tous, J. Trujillo, I. (Eds.). (2005). Las variedades de Olivo en España. Junta de Andalucia. Ministerio de Agricultura Pesca y Alimentación. Ediciones Mundi-Prensa, Madrid, España. We acknowledge the permission by authors, scientific editors and publishers).

Which doesn’t really help clarify things an awful lot. Recent work adds an eastern dimension to the spread of the crop.

June 14, 2023June 14, 2023

Nibbles: Business, CGIAR & FARA, Agrobiodiversity Index, Beans, Artisanal sake, Nabhan on mezcals, Kernza anniversary, Fish diversity, Amazon trees, Dark extinctions

Gardening pioneer says “Be as diverse as possible!“
Frank Elderson, Member of the Executive Board of the ECB and Vice-Chair of the Supervisory Board of the ECB, says businesses should be as biodiverse as possible.
CGIAR and FARA launch an initiative to transform agriculture in Africa but the role of biodiversity is unclear.
Maybe they should embrace the Agrobiodiversity Index, now that it has won a big prize.
Speaking of agricultural biodiversity and prizes, here’s a podcast on the EXARC Experimental Archaeology Award winning project “Investigating the Origin of the Common Bean in the New World.”
A trio of pieces on agrobiodiverse products: sake, mezcal, Kernza.
Don’t forget fish need to be as diverse as possible too.
Ok, not agriculture-related, but this visual essay on finding the tallest tree in the Amazon is really cool.
Not so cool: some species you can only see in natural history collections. The world is not as diverse as possible.

June 12, 2023June 8, 2023

Brainfood: Domestication treble, Introgression treble, Biodiversity mapping double, Oak conservation, Niche modelling double

Plant domestication: setting biological clocks. Domestication changed plants’ timekeeping and made them less resilient, but there is variation among the biological clocks of different organs that could tapped in breeding.
Plant domestication and agricultural ecologies. There have been 7 main paths to plant domestication, or commonalities in the ways that plants were domesticated by people in different parts of the world in the past: ecosystem engineering, ruderal, tuber, grain, segetal, fibre, fruit tree.
Plants cultivated for ecosystem restoration can evolve toward a domestication syndrome. Ok, maybe 8.
Diamonds in the Not-So-Rough: Wild Relative Diversity Hidden in Crop Genomes. The cool alleles you spotted in wild relatives may already be in cultivated genomes, and that can save breeders some time and effort.
Finding needles in a haystack: identification of inter-specific introgressions in wheat genebank collections using low-coverage sequencing data. Ah, here they are.
Interspecific common bean population derived from Phaseolus acutifolius using a bridging genotype demonstrate useful adaptation to heat tolerance. I guess this is an example of the time that could be saved.
Mapping potential conflicts between global agriculture and terrestrial conservation. A third of agricultural production occurs in sites of high biodiversity conservation priority, with cattle, maize, rice, and soybean posing the greatest threat and sugar beet, pearl millet, and sunflower the lowest. No word on how many crop wild relatives are threatened, but there’s a cool online mapping tool that could I suppose be used to mash things up.
Assessing habitat diversity and potential areas of similarity across protected areas globally. At a pinch, this could be used to identify backups for any threatened sites of high biodiversity conservation priority.
Ex situ conservation of two rare oak species using microsatellite and SNP markers. Watch out for the creeping domestication syndrome though, if these ever get used for restoration :)
TreeGOER: a database with globally observed environmental ranges for 48,129 tree species. Even more than all the CWRs we did. But no, I don’t know if those oaks are included…
Ecological Niche Models using MaxEnt in Google Earth Engine: Evaluation, guidelines and recommendations. …but if not you can always work their ranges out for yourself.

May 29, 2023May 25, 2023

Brainfood – Nutrition Edition: Sweet potato double, Seaweed, Fruits & vegetables, Chickpeas, African Indigenous crops, Vegetables, Grapes, Meat

Predictors of vitamin A rich food consumption among women living in households growing orange-fleshed sweetpotatoes in selected regions in Uganda. Women who knew less about vitamin A consumed more vitamin A-rich foods. Go figure.
Degeneration of cleaned-up, virus-tested sweetpotato seed vines in Tanzania. Those orange-fleshed sweetpotatoes better be regularly cleaned, or resistant to viruses.
Seaweed’s contribution to food security in low- and middle-income countries: Benefits from production, processing and trade. It’s the income. Maybe people should sell orange-fleshed sweetpotatoes rather than eat them?
Fruit and vegetable processing and consumption: Knowledge, attitude, and practices among rural women in East Africa. Again, more knowledge, less consumption. Maybe equipment would help?
Characterization of chickpea cultivars and trait specific germplasm for grain protein content and amino acids composition and identification of potential donors for genetic improvement of its nutritional quality. Hopefully knowing about their nutritional value will result in more use by breeders. Consumption is, however, another story.
The Future of Food: Domestication and Commercialization of Indigenous Food Crops in Africa over the Third Decade (2012–2021). More knowledge about Indigenous crops by policy makers is needed for more consumption by regular people.
Vegetables for Healthy Diets in Low- and Middle-Income Countries: A Scoping Review of the Food Systems Literature. Knowledge is increasing, but gaps remain, in particular joining-up-the-dots along the value chain kind.
Tiangong Chuxin: An Early Maturing Pumpkin-shaped Grape Cultivar. I don’t care about its nutritional value or even taste: I’d eat it just for its shape.
The societal role of meat—what the science says. The case for meat.

May 15, 2023May 16, 2023

Brainfood: Vanilla diversity, Moth bean diversity, Lablab genome, Wheat allergens, Strampelli, Core collections, Collection structure, ITK, Sambal diversity

Genetic diversity of the cultivated vanilla in Madagascar. Lots of genetic groups based on SNPs, but not structured in space or environmentally, except maybe by altitude.
Genetic diversity, population structure, and genome-wide association study for the flowering trait in a diverse panel of 428 moth bean (Vigna aconitifolia) accessions using genotyping by sequencing. NW India is a centre of diversity.
Chromosome-level genome assembly and population genomic resource to accelerate orphan crop lablab breeding. Two domestication “events,” with the 2-seeded form originating in Ethiopia.
Reference proteomes of five wheat species as starting point for future design of cultivars with lower allergenic potential. Einkorn is really low in potential allergens.
Nazareno Strampelli and the first Green Revolution. And all without SNPs, GWAS, genomes or proteomes.
Developments on Core Collections of Plant Genetic Resources: Do We Know Enough? Do we ever?
Assessing Genetic Distinctness and Redundancy of Plant Germplasm Conserved Ex Situ Based on Published Genomic SNP Data. Looks like we may know enough for some things after all.
An (un)common remedy to Indigenous communities’ subsistence: revisiting Traditional Knowledge Commons. As we delve deeper and deeper into the genetic diversity of collections, let’s not forget the associated Indigenous Knowledge.
Diversity of sambals, traditional Indonesian chili pastes. Case in point? Any allergens though, I wonder?