- Xylella has an insta. Check out also XF-actors.
- How did I miss the Global Soil Biodiversity Initiative website? Even has the biodiversity soil atlas on there. They’re on Twitter too, of course, as is their director, Dr Monica Farfan.
- Latest Bambu & Rattan Update from INBAR. Check out in particular Prof. Terry Sunderland on African rattan.
Nibbles: Dog domestication, Rice heirlooms, Jungle cities
- Dogs as Swiss army knives.
- Heritage rice in Bengal and Assam.
- The low-density, agrarian approach to ancient urbanism in the humid tropics.
- An example of the above from Tikal.
Brainfood: Food systems & biodiversity, Tree diversity, Cereal micronutrients, African crops in America, Coffee vulnerability, Coffee fungus, Wildrice, Wild coriander, Wild apple genebank, Laperrine’s olive, Maize landraces, Goat domestication, Honey bee cryo
- Biodiversity Towards Sustainable Food Systems: Four Arguments. For the record: food/nutrition security, climate change resilience, sustainable diets, resilience to zoonoses. I would have added something about culture.
- Biodiversity–productivity relationships are key to nature-based climate solutions. Greenhouse gas mitigation helps tree diversity helps productivity helps greenhouse gas mitigation.
- Genetic determinants of micronutrient traits in graminaceous crops to combat hidden hunger. Big crops can help little crops.
- Contributions of African Crops to American Culture and Beyond: The Slave Trade and Other Journeys of Resilient Peoples and Crops. Decolonizing American agriculture.
- Vulnerability of coffee (Coffea spp.) genetic resources in the United States. Americans have a cunning plan for an African crop.
- Historical genomics reveals the evolutionary mechanisms behind multiple outbreaks of the host-specific coffee wilt pathogen Fusarium xylarioides. Coffee Wilt Disease fungus got a boost from banana Panama Disease fungus. Got a plan for this?
- Improved Remote Sensing Methods to Detect Northern Wild Rice (Zizania palustris L.). They’re this close to putting in place an early warning system. Coffee next? But what about those micronutrients, eh?
- Wild coriander: an untapped genetic resource for future coriander breeding. Not only untapped, its very existence was in doubt. Detect this from space, Colin!
- Advanced genebank management of genetic resources of European wild apple, Malus sylvestris, using genome-wide SNP array data. The Dutch field collection can be managed as a single unit. Kind of a relief, probably. Coffee next?
- Contrasting Genetic Footprints among Saharan Olive Populations: Potential Causes and Conservation Implications. Looks like the wild Saharan olive cannot be managed as a single unit. Bet they can be monitored from space though.
- Growing maize landraces in industrialized countries: from the search for seeds to the emergence of new practices and values. Two contrasting approaches by farmers’ associations in France and Italy.
- Herded and hunted goat genomes from the dawn of domestication in the Zagros Mountains. Before goats were morphologically domesticated, they were managed and genetically domesticated. I wonder if coffee was the same.
- Europe’s First Gene Bank for Honey Bees. Really cold drone semen finds a home in Germany.
Nibbles: Legume breeding, Hemp cultivation, Soybean breeding, Acacia taxonomy
- Freeing legumes in Africa.
- Hemp used to be much more free in Italy.
- The unfree history of soybeans in the US.
- Taxonomists are not free to rename acacias at will.
Nibbles: Linguistic diversity, Filipino rice, Cashew, Brassica domestication
- The need to save languages.
- Saving rice diversity in the Philippines.
- Cashews saving farmers in Guinea-Bissau.
- Understanding Brassica rapa diversity in order to save it.