- The next step in the evolution of participatory plant breeding is evolutionary plant breeding.
- 1458 livestock breeds are in trouble.
- A blast from corn’s past. In more ways than one, as this article from High Country News is kinda old.
- The Chinese market in African wildlife is bad for both.
- Let them eat plastic.
- Maclura pomifera is apparently all the rage in Iowa.
- There’s more to Italian wine than chianti.
- “You can’t really get fucked up on kava.” I beg to differ.
- Two independent pieces on the continuing evolution of humans to cope with their diet: starch, milk and meat.
Nibbles: Variety names, Biotech infographic, Satoyama, Wendell Berry, Eating bugs
- Mike Jackson wants to know how many crop varieties you can name. Please tell him. My number is 42.
- This is what CRISPR looks like. In an infographic, that is.
- Japan’s rice terraces were better for biodiversity when they were, you know, full of rice.
- A Wendell Berry biopic?
- Yep, more on eating insects. It’s definitely a thing now.
Nibbles: Craft beer, Citizen breeding, Botanical e-book, Horticultural bio-piracy, Pollinator reports, Rainforest Alliance map, Italian phytotron, YAP portfolio
- Peak hops? Say it ain’t so.
- Day-long plant-breeding-for-the-masses course at Oxford in April.
- Botanists of the twenty-first century: Roles, challenges and opportunities. An e-book for the ages.
- Genes to beans: polyploidy on a plate. A Royal Society lecture by Kathy Willis.
- Some naughty people have been collecting plants in India without permits.
- IPBES tells it like it is on pollinators. In a press release. You try to find the actual report online. Oh and here’s FAO getting in on the act. Though at least for this the report is easy to find.
- Great interactive map of the work of the Rainforest Alliance. Check out the agriculture tab.
- Italian researchers build a time machine. A phytotron, really, but let them have their little fun.
- Speaking of fun, GCARD3 Youth Agripreneurs Projects on “Climate Resilient Indian Cattle” and “fake seeds.” Lots more too, all interesting.
Nibbles: Indian agrobiodiversity, High throughput phenotyping, Diet history, Barley and health, Fish biodiversity, Earthworm diversity, Livestock disasters, Irvingia domestication, Caffeine extraction
- BBC Food Programme on crop diversity in India, with a little help from Bioversity’s Stefano Padulosi (whose name manages to be pronounced in three different ways in 20 minutes.
- How to measure photosynthesis on a grand scale.
- The origins of our diet. It’s the interactions, stupid.
- Barley as superfood. No, not the fermented kind.
- More diverse freshwaters give higher fish yields.
- European earthworm diversity mapped. No word on relationship with yields. Surprisingly difficult to see any correlation with agricultural intensification.
- It’s been a bad time for livestock (and therefore people) in Mongolia and in Ethiopia.
- Domesticating the wild mango that is not a mango but is almost as tasty.
- The weird world of the pure caffeine trade.
On mammal diversity and vegetation biomass
Two global maps coincidentally turned up almost side-by-side on Twitter this weekend. Interesting in their own right individually, they threw up a question for me when I was forced to look at them together in my feed. A paper in Diversity and Distributions mapped what the diversity of large mammals would look like if not for what humans have wrought. Here it is.
And a paper in Global Change Biology mapped above-ground vegetation biomass across the tropics.
So my question is this: why does high-biomass vegetation support a relatively large diversity of mammals in SE Asia, but not in tropical Africa or South America?