- Modern Chinese agronomist praises ancient Chinese agriculture, possibly gets in trouble.
- Domesticating trees is still the next big thing.
- Transform agriculture for a greener economy, says SciDev.net.
- VoA on genebanks, including Svalbard.
- Gerbil enthusiasts tackle millets. Yes, gerbils.
Brainfood: Chestnut restoration, Zoo legislation, Millet landraces, Cassava in Congo, Agroforestry in Philippines, Baobab (again), Silvopastoral system taxonomy
- Modelling chestnut biogeography for American chestnut restoration. As all 7 species have very similar climatic niches, if you could get a blight-resistant hybrid, it would probably be adapted to North American conditions.
- Ex situ conservation programmes in European zoological gardens: Can we afford to lose them? No, and therefore the EU needs to step in. Whoa, talk about a non sequitur.
- The Fine Scale Ethnotaxa Classification of Millets in Southern India. Malayali farmers can consistently recognize more phenotypes than DNA analysis, and some of the cryptic landraces might be really useful.
- Diversity of cassava (Manihot esculenta Crantz) cultivars and its management in the department of Bouenza in the Republic of Congo. High, but decreasing, at least in some villages. But overall? Any collections made?
- Indigenous agroforestry in a changing context: The case of the Erumanen ne Menuvu in Southern Philippines. Despite being divinely-sanctioned, the pengegnewiran swidden system is changing, in response to socio-economic changes. It needs to, and blaming the people because you don’t like the result is not very helpful.
- Variation in biochemical composition of baobab (Adansonia digitata) pulp, leaves and seeds in relation to soil types and tree provenances. Soil has a big effect. At least in Benin.
- Comparing silvopastoral systems and prospects in eight regions of the world. They’re all going to need more active management.
Nibbles: Forests and agriculture, Seed collecting, Banana book, Fermentation, Cucumber history, Myrrh, Farm systems, Dog genetics, Chocolate wars
- Seven forest myths exposed. And more on the work debunking one of them. Yeah I know we already Nibbled it, get over it.
- And you know what, here’s another one we already Nibbled, on collecting seeds in Central Asia. But I just read it again in the hardcopy version and it’s really cool and I like seeing people I know in funny shorts. Incidentally, the dead tree version has a link to Vaviblog that is unaccountably missing online.
- Will no one buy me this fabulous banana book? (Not if you keep being rude to your reader. Ed.)
- Second installment of that we-farm-because-we-like-beer thing. I’m not sure about the theory, but I like the way this guy writes. Yes, it’s a little look at me, look at me. But sometimes you need that.
- Tales of the cucumber. Does anyone remember if we blogged about this paper?
- More to myrrh than meets the eye. And more than most folk need to know.
- Oxford boffins say a pox on both your houses: “environmentally friendly” farms better than conventional and organic.
- National Geographic tackles the dog. Amazingly, all the photos are of, ahem, dogs.
- What’s with all this stuff about cacao lately? Has someone sequenced another variety or something?
Nibbles: Programme evaluation, Slash-and-burn, Goat accents, Share herbaria, ITPGRFA communications, Fish talk, Archaeobrewing
- IFPRI and ILRI put out new free tool on documenting gender and assets data for programme evaluations. Apparently, crop diversity not considered much of an asset.
- The pendulum swings on slash-and-burn? One can hope.
- Different goats sound different. Well there’s a thing.
- Denver Botanic Gardens explains how to share herbarium information. CWRs, take note.
- The ITPGRFA gets itself some RSS feeds.
- And WorldFish a podcast.
- Farming for booze? Start of a series at Scientific American blogs. Can you say “contentious”?
Brainfood: Chicken domestication, Financial crisis and conservation, Cucurbit domestication, Tamarind future, Biofortification via bacteria, Cowpea nutritional composition, Roman bottlegourd, Noug, Rice blast diversity, Pearl millet domestication, Cacao genotyping, Organic ag, Marcela, In situ vs ex situ, Artocarpus roots
- Heritable genome-wide variation of gene expression and promoter methylation between wild and domesticated chickens. Domestication was Lamarckian.
- Global economy interacts with climate change to jeopardize species conservation: the case of the greater flamingo in the Mediterranean and West Africa. Financial crisis leads to closing down of Mediterranean saltpans, which is not good news for flamingo. Climate change doesn’t help. Must be similar examples for plants, Shirley.
- Parallel Evolution Under Domestication and Phenotypic Differentiation of the Cultivated Subspecies of Cucurbita pepo (Cucurbitaceae). C. pepo subsp. pepo and subsp. texana underwent similar genotypic and phenotypic changes during domestication.
- Ecological and human impacts on stand density and distribution of tamarind (Tamarindus indica L.) in Senegal. Climate change will lead to an area of currently low density in the NW being a refugium. Connectivity problems will ensue.
- Biofortification of wheat through inoculation of plant growth promoting rhizobacteria and cyanobacteria. Breeders give up.
- Nutritional ranking of 30 Brazilian genotypes of cowpeas including determination of antioxidant capacity and vitamins. Breeders take heart.
- A short history of Lagenaria siceraria (bottle gourd) in the Roman provinces: morphotypes and archaeogenetics. Out of Asia. And more.
- Functional Properties, Nutritional Value, and Industrial Applications of Niger Oilseeds (Guizotia abyssinica Cass.). It has them, in spades, as this paper summarises.
- Sex at the origin: an Asian population of the rice blast fungus Magnaporthe oryzae reproduces sexually. The Himalayan foothills would seem to be the place where to look for resistance.
- Evolutionary History of Pearl Millet (Pennisetum glaucum [L.] R. Br.) and Selection on Flowering Genes since Its Domestication. Bayesian modelling of 20 random genes supports domestication about 4,800 years ago, with protracted introgression from the wild relative, and selection sweeps suggest flowering related genes unsurprisingly underwent strong selection as the crop spread southward. But a single domestication scenario? Anyway, sounds familiar, doesn’it.
- Genome-Wide Analysis of the World’s Sheep Breeds Reveals High Levels of Historic Mixture and Strong Recent Selection. Much like, ahem, pearl millet. For flowering genes, read horniness genes. The bit about an initially broad sampling of diversity sounds a bit like the horse. Who out there is going to synthesize all this domestication stuff? Not that I’m looking for a meta-narrative, mind.
- Ultra-barcoding in cacao (Theobroma spp.; Malvaceae) using whole chloroplast genomes and nuclear ribosomal DNA. Well, sequence the whole thing and be done with it is what I say, why flaff around with ultra-this and super-that?
- The crop yield gap between organic and conventional agriculture. 20%.
- Marcela, a promising medicinal and aromatic plant from Latin America: A review. Achyrocline satureioides, in the Asteraceae. Yeah, I never heard of it either. But these guys say it’ll make you rich and beautiful.
- Comparative genetic structure within single-origin pairs of rice (Oryza sativa L.) landraces from in situ and ex situ conservation programs in Yunnan of China using microsatellite markers. 2-5 times more unique alleles in the in situ version of various landraces compared to the ex situ version, collected in 1980. But same number of common alleles.
- Mutualism breakdown in breadfruit domestication. More recent cultivars have less abundant and less species-rich arbuscular mycorrhizas.