- Multi-perspective evaluation of phytonutrients – Case study on tomato landraces for fresh consumption. Fancy maths proves different tomato varieties taste different.
- Adaptation to the Local Environment by Modifications of the Photoperiod Response in Crops. It’s all down to a few mutations in all crops.
- Evaluation of the SeedCounter, A Mobile Application for Grain Phenotyping. Seems like a lot of work to just be able to measure wheat seeds, but boys will have their toys.
- Indigenous Polynesian Agriculture in Hawaiʻi. Both intensive and extensive.
- How to make a domesticate. It takes a long time, and involves lots of genes.
- Symbiosis limits establishment of legumes outside their native range at a global scale. Non-symbiotic legumes have spread further than symbiotic ones into non-native areas.
- Wheat Landraces Currently Grown in Turkey: Distribution, Diversity, and Use. More than half of morphotypes (59%) lost since 1920 overall, but none in some areas.
- Ecotypic differentiation under farmers’ selection: Molecular insights into the domestication of Pachyrhizus Rich. ex DC. (Fabaceae) in the Peruvian Andes. Separate Amazonian and Andean lineages, and P. tuberosum arising from P. ahipa.
- Crop health and its global impacts on the components of food security. To better understand acute impacts, model systemic ones.
- Climate-Related Local Extinctions Are Already Widespread among Plant and Animal Species. About half of about 1000 species showed local extinction.
- Rethinking the history of common walnut (Juglans regia L.) in Europe: Its origins and human interactions. Expansion from glacial refugia, followed by human exploitation. Compare and contrast with Asia. Or read about the whole thing in AramcoWorld.
- Agrobiodiversity and a sustainable food future. Apparently all you need to do to support the “use of biological diversity in sustainable agricultural and food systems” is to recognize that there are 4 interconnected themes: (1) genetic resources, ecology and evolution; (2) governance policy, institutions and legal agreements; (3) food, nutrition, health and disease; and (4) global change drivers with social ecological interactions.
- Eastern Mediterranean Mobility in the Bronze and Early Iron Ages: Inferences from Ancient DNA of Pigs and Cattle. Anatolia to southeastern Europe and back to the Levant across the Bronze-Iron Age transition. The Sea Peoples had pigs?
- Contribution of improved rice varieties to poverty reduction and food security in sub-Saharan Africa. NERICA adoption increased annual per capita income by US$4 per year from 2000, despite yields going down a bit.
- Farming and the geography of nutrient production for human use: a transdisciplinary analysis. Need to try to maintain production diversity as farm size increases. But let Jess Fanzo explain it better.
Brainfood: Insurance value, Forages/invasives, Chenopod crops, Non-descript goats, Holy grapes, Black maize, Wild rice diversity, Cassava seedlings, Knotweed domestication syndrome, Wild potato use, Farmers/researchers, Winged yam diversity, Genes to ecosystems, Wild carrots
- The Value of Biodiversity as an Insurance Device. So apparently the “Epstein-Zin-Weil specification of the utility function allows us to disentangle the effects of risk aversion and aversion to fluctuations.” Good to know.
- The Invasive Legacy of Forage Grass Introductions into Florida. Sometimes biodiversity is bad for you, Epstein-Zin-Weil specification or not.
- Cultigen Chenopods in the Americas: A Hemispherical Perspective. Why did the North American one not do a quinoa?
- The potential of landscape genomics approach in the characterization of adaptive genetic diversity in indigenous goat genetic resources: A South African perspective. “[N]on-descript indigenous veld goats” no longer.
- Collection and characterization of grapevine genetic resources (Vitis vinifera) in the Holy Land, towards the renewal of ancient winemaking practices. Some of the local varieties could make a decent tipple.
- Genetic studies regarding the control of seed pigmentation of an ancient European pointed maize (Zea mays L.) rich in phlobaphenes: the “Nero Spinoso” from the Camonica valley. But do we really want to promote a landrace as a functional food?
- Genetic diversity patterns in ex situ collections of Oryza officinalis Wall. ex G. Watt revealed by morphological and microsatellite markers. Malesia separates out from SE Asia, and similarities between PNG and Philippines points to long-distance dispersal by birds. Or germplasm collectors.
- Perceptual selection and the unconscious selection of ‘volunteer’ seedlings in clonally propagated crops: an example with African cassava (Manihot esculenta Crantz) using ethnobotany and population genetics. Occasional seedlings are allowed to survive not so much because they look different, but because they look similar, to existing landraces, even though they may be genetically distinct.
- Evolutionary “Bet-Hedgers” under Cultivation: Investigating the Domestication of Erect Knotweed (Polygonum erectum L.) using Growth Experiments. Experimental domestication pretty quickly gets rid of that peskily bet-hedging germination heteromorphism.
- Are We Getting Better at Using Wild Potato Species in Light of New Tools? Not until we move on from conserving populations and start documenting individual plants in depth.
- Crucible of Crop Diversity: Forging Partnership with Farmer Breeders and Innovators for Higher Climate Resilience. Experience of the Honey Bee Network in bringing together farmers and researchers.
- Understanding the genetic diversity and population structure of yam (Dioscorea alata L.) using microsatellite markers. 17 groups among 384 global accessions, reflecting geography, ploidy and morpho-agronomy.
- Harnessing diversity from ecosystems to crops to genes. “…currently, approximately 75% of the genetic diversity of crops may have been lost.” I do like that “may.”
- Multivariate analysis of morphological diversity among closely related Daucus species and subspecies in Tunisia. The revenge of morphology: D. sahariensis, plus 4 subspecies of D. carota.
Brainfood: Slow Food, Runner bean diversity, Bamboo diversity, Istrian grapes, Smelly cheeses, Wild pseudocereals, Diversity & phenology, VAM diversity, Oases apocalypse, Wild wheat physiology, PepperHub, Bactrian camel diversity, Swiss livestock, CWR conservation, Tree database
- Developing radically-new meanings through the collaboration with radical circles: Slow Food as a platform for envisioning innovative meanings. Companies should collaborate with radicals. Presumably in order to turn them. #resist
- Unraveling agronomic and genetic aspects of runner bean (Phaseolus coccineus L.). At least we know what we don’t know.
- Total leaf crude protein, amino acid composition and elemental content in the USDA-ARS bamboo germplasm collections. If you want to use bamboo as feed, you need to choose among the 100-odd species very carefully.
- The Gene Collection of Autochthonous Wine Grape Varieties at the Institute as a Contribution to the Sustainable Development of Wine Growing and Viticulture in Istria. 3591 seems a hell of a lot, but wow.
- Phage Biodiversity in Artisanal Cheese Wheys Reflects the Complexity of the Fermentation Process. Modern methods kill a lot of phages.
- Setting conservation priorities for Argentina’s pseudocereal crop wild relatives. Go north, young CWR researcher!
- Flowering phenology shifts in response to biodiversity loss. Experimentally decreasing diversity in a California grassland advanced phenology.
- Activity, diversity and function of arbuscular mycorrhizae vary with changes in agricultural management intensity. No-till helps VAM, helps soils.
- Oases in Southern Tunisia: The End or the Renewal of a Clever Human Invention? I’m not hopeful.
- Physiological responses to drought stress in wild relatives of wheat: implications for wheat improvement. 4 species show promise.
- PepperHub, a Pepper Informatics Hub for the chilli pepper research community. Hot off the presses.
- Molecular diversity and phylogenetic analysis of domestic and wild Bactrian camel populations based on the mitochondrial ATP8 and ATP6 genes. The wild species is not the ancestor, and the domesticated species is a geographic mess.
- GenMon-CH: a Web-GIS application for the monitoring of Farm Animal Genetic Resources (FAnGR) in Switzerland. Upload data on your herd or flock, end up with a map of where the breed is most endangered.
- Stealing into the wild: conservation science, plant breeding and the makings of new seed enclosures. Ouch!
- GlobalTreeSearch – the first complete global database of tree species and country distributions. 60,065, about 10% crop wild relatives.
Brainfood: Banana identification, Donkey domestication, Mouse domestication, African cattle, Pig domestication, Biofuels, Biofortification, Genomics for breeding, Species movement, Crop diversity double, N fixation, Ag commercialization models, Wild beans, Brassica domestication, Teaching biodiversity
- Molecular and cytological characterization of the global Musa germplasm collection provides insights into the treasure of banana diversity. 16% of 1500 accessions need taxonomic verification. Could have been much worse.
- Why the Donkey Did Not Go South: Disease as a Constraint on the Spread of Equus asinus into Southern Africa. Gap in distribution between Kenya and southern Africa until colonial times probably down to trypanosomiasis.
- Origins of house mice in ecological niches created by settled hunter-gatherers in the Levant 15,000 y ago. Hunter gatherers inadvertently domesticated the mouse.
- The genome landscape of indigenous African cattle. Now we know where the genes for heat tolerance and tick resistance can be found, and it’s where you’d think.
- Insights into early pig domestication provided by ancient DNA analysis. In northern Europe, around 4000 BC, people started crossing pigs from the south with local wild boars. What were they thinking?
- Recent grassland losses are concentrated around U.S. ethanol refineries. The revenge of geography.
- Provitamin A biofortification of crop plants: a gold rush with many miners. “One crucial aspect that needs further experimentation is whether β-carotene-fortified crops can improve vitamin A status in the main targets of the biofortification efforts, that is, malnourished adults and children.” Just going to leave that out there.
- Genomic innovation for crop improvement. Longer reads needed. Is there no satisfying these gene-jockeys?
- Biodiversity redistribution under climate change: Impacts on ecosystems and human well-being. Species movements affect ecosystem functioning and service provision: “The indirect effects of climate change on food webs are also expected to compound the direct effects on crops.”
- Feeding the Household, Growing the Business, or Just Showing Off? Farmers’ Motivations for Crop Diversity Choices in Papua New Guinea. Some people grow lots of crops because it’s cool. But why wasn’t this done at the intraspecific level?
- To Specialize or Diversify: Agricultural Diversity and Poverty Dynamics in Ethiopia. Forget coolness, crop diversity makes you less poor.
- Biogeography of nodulated legumes and their nitrogen-fixing symbionts. Australia is weird.
- Plantations, outgrowers and commercial farming in Africa: agricultural commercialisation and implications for agrarian change. They all have their place.
- Genomic history of the origin and domestication of common bean unveils its closest sister species. Wild populations from northern Peru and Ecuador are not derived from wild Phaseolus vulgaris which migrated there from Mesoamerica but are actually a different species which predates the evolution of wild common bean.
- Genomic inferences of domestication events are corroborated by written records in Brassica rapa. Five genetic groups, with rapini at the base.
- Walking and talking the tree of life: Why and how to teach about biodiversity. Forget ranks, try clades.
Brainfood: Hot pepper double, Tibetan chickens, Watermelon diversity, Sunflower accessions, CWR meh, E Africa early ag, Pristine myth, African deforestation
- Screening old peppers (Capsicum spp.) for disease resistance and pungency-related traits. Resistance does not correlate with geography within an Andean collection.
- Bioactive Compound Variability in a Brazilian Capsicum Pepper Collection. No accession is high in everything.
- Genetic evidence from mitochondrial DNA corroborates the origin of Tibetan chickens. That is, the surrounding regions.
- Morphological and genetic diversity analysis of Citrullus landraces from India and their genetic inter relationship with continental watermelons. Modern cultivars are homogeneous.
- Molecular diversity of sunflower populations maintained as genetic resources is affected by multiplication processes and breeding for major traits. Multiplication slightly reduces within-accession diversity. Well, in France anyway.
- Past and Future Use of Wild Relatives in Crop Breeding. Yada yada.
- Subsistence mosaics, forager-farmer interactions, and the transition to food production in eastern Africa. The transition to agriculture in E Africa was more than just the Bantu expansion.
- Persistent effects of pre-Columbian plant domestication on Amazonian forest composition. Domesticated species are more common around archaeological sites. Sounds like agriculture is not much more than the Arawakan and Tupí expansions.
- Human population growth offsets climate-driven increase in woody vegetation in sub-Saharan Africa. In some places climate change has positive effects, but these are swamped where there is high population growth.