Forests & trees

Nibbles: Ug99, Heirloom & wild tomatoes, Opium, Healthy flavours, Quinoa descriptors, Wild yak community conservation, Phenotyping facility, Tree app, ABS & EU, C4, Barley in Ethiopia, Chinese coffee

Not totally wild genes protect wheat from Ug99.
Not really wild Texas Wild tomato brings Texan back to gardening. These in Peru are wild though.
Speaking of gardening, here’s Michael Pollan on his struggles with opium.
Wild, healthy fruit flavours becoming more popular on the soft drink market, but not clear to what extent they will come from actual plants, wild or otherwise. You know, plants with yield variation and other inconveniences. Plants that some people rely on for nutrition, by the way.
Descriptors for quinoa, including the wild species. And more, much more.
I wonder if there are descriptors for wild yaks.
New UK facility for phenotyping plants, including wild ones, I’m sure.
And if those wild UK plants are trees, you can use this app to identify them, before phenotyping them. Assuming you can dig them up and squeeze them into the new facility. Anyway, maybe one of them will be European Tree of the Year.
Of course, if you wanted access to the genetic resources of such trees, you’d have to deal with the Nagoya Protocol, which the EU is getting to grips with, don’t worry.
Not many C4 species among UK trees, I guess.
Teff is C4, but that isn’t stopping people trying to replace it with barley in injira.
Next thing you know the Chinese will be swapping tea for coffee. No, wait.

The Lancet goes open source. Well, kinda.
Alt-World Food Prize winners. None of whom are at the Conference on Agroecology for Sustainable Food Systems in Europe: A Transformative Agenda, though.
I guess there’s no chance of Jeffrey Sachs landing the actual World Food Prize. Well, you never know.
If you’re in Britain and you get the urge to measure a tree, now you can share your results.
Maybe the Tunisians should do something similar, at least for their pears, before it’s too late.
“The plan notes biofuels have an important role to play in increasing our energy security, fostering rural economic development and reducing greenhouse gas emissions from the transportation sector.” Riiiight.
“We started doing this before heirlooms were fashionable. We knew in our hearts it was the right thing to do.”
Quite a bit of agrobiodiversity in the latest Plant Cuttings.
India goes in for high throughput phenotyping for drought tolerance.

Brazil’s flora moves online. And its agriculture into its favelas.
Taxonomy 101.
Wish the people who wrote this press release on “canary seed” had taken a taxonomy course. It’s Phalaris canariensis, it turns out.
African breeders to be trained at UCDavis. Ok, but what about WACCI? What’s going on? Cornell-Davis smackdown?
Further proof, if any were needed, of the importance of wild bees.
Tajikistan gets its first World Heritage Site. Includes most of the Pamirs, so surely a whole lot of agricultural biodiversity, both wild and cultivated, plant and animal. Not that that was the prime mover for protection, probably.
Incidentally, there’s a list of World Heritage Sites in danger, and it includes Rennell Island in the Solomons. The reason I bring it up is that it is famous for a local coconut variety. Hope that’s not endangered!
Nordic Food Lab gets money to experiment with cooking insects.
Belize TV looks to agrobiodiversity to cope with climate change.

If you can map neglected diseases by phone, can you map neglected crops? I bet you can.
It’s the turn of Samoans to be chided for not eating enough leafy greens.
I had no idea AfricaRice had a podcast.
Now we gotta worry about G&T too? Enough, already.
Video on the wild yams of Sri Lanka. Not just yams, though, by the look of it.
100 recipes to understand the history of food? Count me in.
More on the Polymotu Concept from our friends at SPC. Great gig if you can get it.

A toolkit to help indigenous communities do conservation. Should they need one.
On the other hand… Half of Japan’s endangered species hotspots are found in satoyama, which are under pressure. Compare and contrast with rice farming in Thailand.
Learn all about some medicinal plants of the Amazon, minus their scientific names. Not including runa tea. Lots of other opportunities out there, though.
Maybe even including oysters.
Jeremy no doubt to feast on the mollusc after spilling the beans on the EU seed regulations at the Seed Savers jamboree.
Wonder what Calestous Juma thinks of those regulations.
But I bet he (and his father, who introduced the crop to his region of Kenya) would like this cassava website to rule them all.
The Volcani Institute‘s gifts to the world…
…probably include new strawberries, but not this one.
Scientists straining, failing to find plant to meaningfully compare to the giant panda.
Bioversity does up its iButtons.
And gets a namecheck in a paean to the FAO Commission on GRFA on its 30th birthday. All this FAO stuff is because its Conference is on this week. I don’t suppose any of it will be more important than Amartya Sen’s speech.