- Mongolians nuts for pine nuts.
- Indians increasingly nuts for heirloom rices.
- Tea: a tale of two words.
- Wait, Mongabay does podcasts now?
- DfID backs sustainable supply chains. But is diversity considered?
- The origins of cryo.
- Student saves apple. Species, that is.
- Scurvy was not all bad? Who needs fruit.
Nibbles: Irradiated mangoes, PNG genebank, Chinese taro, Strawberry breeding, DNA sequencing, Googling sheep, Weird pineapple, Agroforestry, Olive diversity, Xylella, Fermentation, Pulque & mezcal, Cheese & donkeys, Italian food double, Tomato double, Fairchild, Vanilla history, Potato history, Kelemu
- Did you miss us? Well, we’re making up for lost time today. Buckle up.
- Seafaring mangoes.
- India to help PNG get (another?) genebank.
- Somebody mention taro? The Chinese are coming.
- Strawberries for Christmas.
- Handheld genotyping. Brave new world.
- All the sheep in the world.
- Trees > lungs.
- Pink pineapple. Yeah, why not.
- Tuscan olives are Etruscan.
- Wonder if they’ll survive.
- Fermentation never went away.
- Case in point #1: pulque.
- Which is a cousin of mezcal.
- Case in point #2: cheese.
- Of which this is the most expensive, apparently.
- 2018 is the year of italian food, according to italians.
- Maybe they’ll use this infographic to advertize it.
- The transatlantic history of a mainstay of italian cooking, the tomato.
- Which looks really diverse in the Canaries too.
- “Food spy” is a bit harsh on Fairchild.
- Wonder if he ever collected vanilla.
- Or potatoes.
- Hero is about right for Segenet.
Brainfood: Wheat exudates, Conservation threats, Resilience, Dietary recommendations, Urban green spaces, Dog spread, Wild foods, Ethnic fish, Brazilian cattle, Nocturnal fixation, Agroforestry impacts
- Evolution of the crop rhizosphere: impact of domestication on root exudates in tetraploid wheat (Triticum turgidum L.). Domestication and breeding have led to (probably adaptive) changes in root exudates.
- Threats from urban expansion, agricultural transformation and forest loss on global conservation priority areas. Vertebrate Biodiversity Hotspots are most threatened by all three factors. Plants too?
- Patterns and drivers of biodiversity–stability relationships under climate extremes. Species richness may not be enough to buffer ecosystems from extreme precipitations events. But a different metric would give a different result?
- Evaluating the environmental impacts of dietary recommendations. Adopting nationally recommended diets would help the environment.
- On the Use of Hedonic Price Indices to Understand Ecosystem Service Provision from Urban Green Space in Five Latin American Megacities. There’s an overall strong positive correlation between urban greenery and house prices, but it’s context-specific.
- Disease: A Hitherto Unexplored Constraint on the Spread of Dogs (Canis lupus familiaris) in Pre-Columbian South America. Yes, why are there no dogs in the Amazon?
- Children and Wild Foods in the Context of Deforestation in Rural Malawi. Fewer wild foods in more deforested sites, and fewer sold by children from better-off households. What of the nutrition outcomes, though?
- Biodiversity defrosted: unveiling non-compliant fish trade in ethnic food stores. About 40% of samples in Liverpool and Manchester mislabelled.
- Population viability analysis of the Crioula Lageano cattle. It’s going to be fine.
- The Kalanchoë genome provides insights into convergent evolution and building blocks of crassulacean acid metabolism. Next stop, CAM rice.
- Contribution of trees to the conservation of biodiversity and ecosystem services in agricultural landscapes. It depends. But what would those kids in Malawi say?
Our friends the seed dispersers
Botany One has been running an entertaining little series from Nigel Chaffey on how plants get about, as seeds and as the gametes that produce seeds. In the third and final part, we get to plants that could reasonably be considered of interest here, to whit cacao and useful forest trees. It turns out that chimpanzees in West Africa are not above nicking a few pods from cacao trees and spreading the seeds an average of 407 m from the plantations. I like the ideas that this illuminates the thorny question of who “owns” a crop.
Sticking with West African trees, it seems that gorilla and chimpanzee dung offers “a cost effective and non-invasive way to restore native forested habitats”. Of course, if the gorillas and chimpanzees are themselves threatened and don’t travel widely, that’s not going to help forests further afield. Chaffey suggests collecting their dung and distributing these auto-fertilising, self-selecting seed packages directly over the area to be reforested.
I wonder what the forest genetic resources people would make of that?
Brainfood: Yeast census, Kansas collections, Species abundance, Dietary diversity, Seed longevity, Tree conservation, Yam metabolomics, Ethiopian mustard shattering, Improving ITPGRFA
- Census of Yeasts Isolated from Natural Ecosystem and Conserved in Worldwide Collections. 27 countries, 41 collections, 58,095 strains.
- The Curiosity of Collections: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at What’s in the Drawers, Cabinets and Refrigerators of K-State Collections and Why It’s Important. Including the Wheat Genetics Resource Center.
- Species are not most abundant in the centre of their geographic range or climatic niche. Even trees.
- Tartary Buckwheat Genetic Diversity in the Himalayas Associated with Farmer Landrace Diversity and Low Dietary Dependence. Relying on fewer food crops is bad for crop genetic diversity.
- Contrasting tocol ratios associated with seed longevity in rice variety groups. It’s the relative amounts of different homologues, not the total.
- Gene conservation of tree species — Banking on the future. Proceedings of a workshop. USA-centred, but lessons more generally applicable.
- Deep Learning for Multi-task Plant Phenotyping. Computer can count wheat spikes and spikelets.
- Metabolite profiling of yam (Dioscorea spp.) accessions for use in crop improvement programmes. 200 compounds on 49 accessions in 4 species. But now what?
- Molecular diversity analysis and genetic mapping of pod shatter resistance loci in Brassica carinata L. 5 QTLs for shatter resistance found in Australian collection. In other news, there’s an Australian collection of Ethiopian mustard.
- Access without benefit-sharing: Design, effectiveness and reform of the FAO Seed Treaty. Hybrid SMTA/subscription model, gradual Annex I expansion, successively improving domestic implementation.