- Festivals, rituals and seed-saving go hand in hand, as this photo essay on Koraput’s Adivasis shows for World Indigenous Peoples Day.
- Speaking of unlikely alliances, Israeli and Palestinian researchers have teamed up on wheat that can take the heat in a warming, drying Middle East.
- Not to be outdone in the resilience stakes, the cowpea shrugs off both drought and flooding, according to FAO.
- If all this talk of resilient crops has you inspired, here’s a how-to on starting your own community seed bank, in South Africa or anywhere else for that matter.
- And for when preservation is really about nostalgia: Romania’s Buzau genebank is keeping childhood mint flavours alive, chocolate, clove and vanilla notes included.
Nibbles: Museum of Cider, Aport apple, Rattan genebank, Sri Lanka rice, Saudi coffee landscapes
- In the UK, Herefordshire’s Museum of Cider is picking up national recognition for its genebank of heritage apple trees. The BBC’s canonical autumnal apple story comes a little early this year.
- Speaking of iconic apples, Kazakhstan is scaling up efforts to bring back the Aport, the giant heirloom that once made Almaty famous. No word of museums, though. Or cider.
- Over in the Philippines, Department of Environment and Natural Resources is beefing up its rattan genebank to keep pace with demand, with forest stewards in Bukidnon planting seedlings to match. Furniture makers need genebanks as much as cider makers.
- Sri Lanka’s pre-Green Revolution heirloom rice varieties, purana haal, are being eyed for their resilience and disease-management potential. Good thing they’re in the national genebank.
- Saudi Arabia’s Jazan terraced coffee farms are turning into rural and ecotourism hotspots, proving not all agrobiodiversity needs to be in a genebank to survive. But it helps.
Brainfood: Mapping edition
-
We’re moving house so this might be the last post for a while. See you on the other side. In the meantime, enjoy this bunch of papers on different applications of spatial analysis to agricultural biodiversity and associated topics.
- Addressing global hotspots of drought-related crop production losses. A crop-specific drought sensitivity metric for 17 major crops finds rainfed production losses of 10% globally under historically observed extremes, enough to feed 2 billion people, with hotspots in the US Midwest, eastern Brazil, the Mediterranean and South Asia. Sustainable irrigation expansion and crop switching could avoid 60% of those losses. No word on varietal change, but I’m sure it would help.
- GEM-Forest: A Global satellite EMbedding–based map of forests and tree crops for 2020. Using Google DeepMind’s Alpha Earth Foundation embeddings, this 10 m global dataset classifies forest, non-forest and tree crop areas with 90% accuracy, showing that lightweight classifiers on satellite embeddings 1 can rival more complex forest-monitoring pipelines built to support things like the EU Deforestation Regulation.
- Global distribution of cattle, horses, goats, sheep and buffaloes at 1 km resolution for 2000–2022 based on subnational census data and spatiotemporal machine learning. Harmonizing 55,336 census polygons across 147 countries produces annual 1 km livestock headcount and density layers for five species, letting users track shifting grazing pressure over more than two decades rather than relying on single-year snapshots. 2
- A Spatial-Econometric Analysis of Fruit Tree Diversity in Lebanon: A contextual framework for supporting smallholder farmers. How geography, socio-economic conditions and local context shape fruit tree diversity in Lebanon, helping identify where interventions could best support smallholder resilience.
- High-resolution mapping of rice cropping pattern, intensity, calendar, and ecosystem type across Southeast Asia. Joins the growing pile of fine-resolution rice products for the region, this one distinguishing not just how many harvests a field gets but which rice ecosystem (irrigated, rainfed, upland) it belongs to. Is which variety is being grown next on the agenda?
- Entrenchment of cropping patterns reinforces climate exposure for certain crops in US. County-level analysis of US cropping decisions finds that climate risk has actually risen for some crops (like rainfed soybeans) even as it fell for others, suggesting economic and policy incentives are keeping farmers planted in increasingly climate-mismatched patterns rather than nudging them toward the drought-sensitivity-driven switching the first paper above models.
Brainfood: Collaboration edition
- Dietary diversity, food security, and development projects in low- and middle-income contexts: Findings from 24 countries. Development projects are most effective at improving dietary diversity and food security when they bring together agriculture, nutrition and local communities.
- Enhancing farmers’ access to neglected crop seeds for healthy diets in a changing climate: six recommendations for policy action. Improving farmers’ access to opportunity crop seeds requires coordinated action across seed systems, with researchers, policymakers, seed producers and farming communities all playing complementary roles.
- The effects of seed policies, laws and regulations on farmers’ ability to access and use diverse, locally adapted farmers’ varieties and landraces. Seed policies shape collaboration between farmers, communities and formal seed systems, and regulations can either enable or constrain the exchange of locally adapted varieties that keeps agricultural diversity alive.
- Studying vanishing dietary diversity before it is lost: the World Diet Initiative. The World Diet Initiative brings together nutrition science, ecology and cultural knowledge to understand disappearing food traditions, showing that protecting dietary diversity requires collaboration across disciplines and communities.
- The Spanish Network of Genetic Conservation Units: a cooperative tool for the conservation and sustainable use of forest genetic resources under a changing environment. The Spanish Network of Genetic Conservation Units show how sharing expertise and responsibilities can strengthen forest conservation.
- Strengthening national genebanks through genomics and regional collaboration: Lessons from Latin America and the Caribbean. A regional community of practice is helping national genebanks overcome technical and institutional barriers through shared genomic approaches, turning isolated collections into connected systems for conserving and using crop diversity.
Brainfood: Wild chickpea, Feral brassica, Peruvian cacao, Panamanian cacao, Tree diversity, Healthy diets in PNG
- Genome-wide molecular diversity analyses identify wild Cicer as reservoirs of variations for chickpea improvement. Wild relatives of chickpea harbour a wealth of genetic variation that has yet to be exploited by breeders. But it’s mainly within species.
- Genetic and Morphological Diversity in Spontaneous Populations of Brassica rapa: How Do Feral Populations Differ From Wild Ones? When a crop escapes cultivation, does it become wild again? Apparently not. Pity.
- Genetic structure of traditional cacao reveals four new genetic lineages in indigenous Amazonian sites in Peru. Genetic analysis of traditional cacao maintained by Indigenous communities in the Peruvian Amazon uncovers four previously undescribed genetic lineages.
- Contrasting germplasm composition and propagation practices in the two major cacao-growing areas in Panama. Two of Panama’s principal cacao-growing regions have developed markedly different genetic profiles, reflecting both the varieties farmers cultivate and how they propagate them. I think they have been previously described though.
- Ecological multifunctionality of watersheds increases with tree species richness. Watersheds planted with a greater diversity of tree species perform better across multiple ecological functions simultaneously, including nutrient cycling, soil protection and water regulation.
- Nutrition sensitive poverty and its correlates in Papua New Guinea: incorporating healthy diet targets into poverty measurement. Conventional poverty measures ask whether people can afford basic necessities. Why not ask a more demanding question: can they afford a healthy diet? Hopefully meaning a diverse one.