- Text Mining National Commitments towards Agrobiodiversity Conservation and Use. Fancy maths cannot find evidence of country commitment to seed diversity.
- Optimized breeding strategies to harness Genetic Resources with different performance levels. How a public breeding programme can help out private breeding programme.
- Introgression of novel genetic diversity to improve soybean yield. Public breeding programme helps out private breeding programme. I suppose both got something out of it.
- Rapid Least Concern: towards automating Red List assessments. Nifty web application takes all the fun out of red listing. We talked about this, people.
- Mapping child growth failure across low- and middle-income countries. Even countries and regions that are generally doing well have stubborn hotspots.
- Feeding ten billion people is possible within four terrestrial planetary boundaries. Feeding, but not necessarily nourishing.
- Genebank Operation in the Arena of Access and Benefit-Sharing Policies. Use the SMTA for everything.
- Multiregional origins of the domesticated tetraploid wheats. Semi-domesticated in the southern Levant, then moved to the northern Fertile Crescent to be finished off. Compare and contrast with barley.
- Conservation implications of limited Native American impacts in pre-contact New England. Native Americans didn’t manage woodland by controlled burning after all…
- Global change impacts on forest and fire dynamics using paleoecology and tree census data for eastern North America. …Sure they did. Interesting discussion on this on Twitter.
- Multiple streams of genetic diversity in Japonica rice. It’s basically a pan-genome.
- Genomic analyses reveal selection footprints in rice landraces grown under on‐farm conservation conditions during a short‐term period of domestication. Some interesting genetic changes after 27 years of on-farm management, but no erosion.
- Breeding tepary bean (Phaseolus acutifolius) for drought adaptation: A review. You need other species.
- High-quality genome sequence of white lupin provides insight into soil exploration and seed quality. Winter and spring varieties are genetically distinct from each other, and from landraces.
- Genetic diversity and domestication of hazelnut (Corylus avellana L.) in Turkey. Hardly domesticated at all.
- Exploitation and utilization of tropical rainforests indicated in dental calculus of ancient Oceanic Lapita culture colonists. Including bananas.
- Benchmarking genetic diversity in a third-generation breeding population of Melaleuca alternifolia. There’s still quite a bit of diversity around.
Brainfood: Food sustainability, Phenotyping barriers, Andean agrobiodiversity, Mango diversity, Wild Brassica diversity, Domestication database, Future crops, Great Dying, Food supplies, Nutritious ag, Wild olives, Pink cassava, Landrace diversity
- Global map and indicators of food system sustainability. Includes crop diversity, based on Khoury et al.
- Phenotyping and Plant Breeding: Overcoming the Barriers. Mostly comes down to good experimental design.
- The Spatial-Temporal Dynamics of Potato Agrobiodiversity in the Highlands of Central Peru: A Case Study of Smallholder Management across Farming Landscapes. Intensification and upward movement, while maintaining diversity.
- Diversity of a Large Collection of Natural Populations of Mango (Mangifera indica Linn.) Revealed by Agro-Morphological and Quality Traits. Lowish diversity, but not so low as to fail to provide year-round production.
- Intraspecific diversification of the crop wild relative Brassica cretica Lam. using demographic model selection. Diverse populations do not necessarily mean diverse adaptation.
- Crop Origins and Phylo Food: A database and a phylogenetic tree to stimulate comparative analyses on the origins of food crops. When and where current crops were domesticated.
- The climatic challenge: Which plants will people use in the next century? When and where future crops will be domesticated.
- Earth system impacts of the European arrival and Great Dying in the Americas after 1492. 56 million deaths.
- Multidimensional characterization of global food supply from 1961 to 2013. Animal-source foods + sugar up in the East, down in the West. Everybody’s eating their vegetables.
- Exploring solution spaces for nutrition-sensitive agriculture in Kenya and Vietnam. Could grown more, and different, vegetables.
- Evaluation of early vigor traits in wild olive germplasm. Potential as dwarfing rootstocks.
- Agronomic and biochemical evaluation of cassava clones with roots that have pink pulp. 2 of 9 from the Embrapa collection have potential.
- Management Practices and Breeding History of Varieties Strongly Determine the Fine Genetic Structure of Crop Populations: A Case Study Based on European Wheat Populations. Landraces show more intra-sample diversity than modern varieties. Wait, there must be more to it than that…
- High-resolution and bias-corrected CMIP5 projections for climate change impact assessments. 7 TB of data for your delectation, thanks to CGIAR.
Nibbles: Risks & solutions edition
- How nature-related risks matter to business.
- Exhibit A: beer.
- Exhibit B: wine and wine.
- Looking at it the other way, some infographics to sum up the impact of food production on the environment.
- And then there are nature-based solutions…
- Sometimes companies do good just for the hell of it: e.g. ohia conservation in Hawaii.
- And sometimes it just takes family.
- “Despite the challenges of climate change and state fragility in parts of Africa, the continent has the potential to not only achieve food and nutrition security, but to leverage the food sector for its overall development.”
- Some tips on how to communicate all the above.
Brainfood: Food access, Rare species, Italian landraces, Forest status, CC & production, Myanmar nutrition, Super-pangenome, Plant pest priorities, Peanut resistance, Maize coring, EAT-Lancet costs, Sorghum tannins double, Dutch cattle core
- Food Access Deficiencies in Sub-saharan Africa: Prevalence and Implications for Agricultural Interventions. Income doesn’t necessarily translate into better nutrition, but keeping livestock does. Happy New Year.
- The commonness of rarity: Global and future distribution of rarity across land plants. Rare species are especially vulnerable to climate and land use change.
- Exploring on-farm agro-biodiversity: a study case of vegetable landraces from Puglia region (Italy). High vegetable landrace diversity may be linked to poor soils and distance from urban centres.
- Measuring Forest Biodiversity Status and Changes Globally. Combines biodiversity significance and intactness, and comes up with not that many places.
- Escaping the perfect storm of simultaneous climate change impacts on agriculture and marine fisheries. Business as usual means 90% of world’s population will see declines in both agricultural and fisheries production.
- Potential for smart food products in rural Myanmar: use of millets and pigeonpea to fill the nutrition gap. 2 weeks of inclusion had positive effect on wasting, stunting and underweight.
- Super-Pangenome by Integrating the Wild Side of a Species for Accelerated Crop Improvement. Add up species pangenomes for a whole genepool. Would be cool to grow it.
- Plant Pest Impact Metric System (PPIMS): Framework and guidelines for a common set of metrics to classify and prioritise plant pests. Host crop value, market access, feasibility of management and reversibility are the most important ones.
- A new source of root-knot nematode resistance from Arachis stenosperma incorporated into allotetraploid peanut (Arachis hypogaea). You have to cross it with another wild relative first.
- The impact of sample selection strategies on genetic diversity and representativeness in germplasm bank collections. Different approaches to making cores tested with maize data from Seeds of Discovery.
- Affordability of the EAT–Lancet reference diet: a global analysis. US$2.84 per day, or more than household per capita income for at least 1.58 billion people.
- Allelochemicals targeted to balance competing selections in African agroecosystems. Levels of tannins in sorghum correlated with taste receptor variant in humans and presence of sparrows.
- Genetic Architecture of Chilling Tolerance in Sorghum Dissected with a Nested Association Mapping Population. Chilling tolerance associated with low tannin and short stature. No word on the role of sparrows.
- Characterization of Genetic Diversity Conserved in the Gene Bank for Dutch Cattle Breeds. Almost optimized, at least for bulls.
Nibbles: Sacred forests, Morning glory, Organic cereals, Sorghum diversity, Phoenix studentship
- The church forests of Ethiopia.
- Monumental monographic study of Ipomoea.
- New project on breeding cereals for organic farming in Europe.
- Sorghum genetic resources in the USA.
- Fun studentship on date palm diversity.