- Slow Food and FAO join forces “to develop joint actions to improve the livelihoods of small-scale farmers and others working in rural areas”. What could possibly go wrong?
- Five ways to enjoy a walnut. But not until next harvest (except for 1 and 2)
- A Pan-Hellenic Seed Exchange Festival took place last weekend. Sorry we missed it.
- A revision of the Dulcamaroid Clade of Solanum L. (Solanaceae). Oh boy! Wild relative heaven.
- If you’re in Suffolk, England, on 25 May you could join a study visit about agroforestry. And tell us about it here.
- Fascinating write-up of Ajay Jha, whose “primary objective is to find profitable models for sustainable, nutritious, local urban and small acreage food production”.
Brainfood: Forest restoration, Vegetable diversity, Intensification costs, Community forests, Baja oases, Nigerian foods, European wetlands, Landscape diversity & resilience, European conservation prioritization
- Can Ficus Sp. Forests Be Restored Through Vegetative Propagation? Yes. But with the reduced genetic diversity and all, for how long?
- A qualitative assessment of diversity and factors leading to genetic erosion of vegetables: a case study of Varamin (Iran). Species richness only, settle down. But, pace the title, quantitative.
- Agricultural intensification escalates future conservation costs. Because of higher land rents. Just can’t win.
- Common property protected areas: Community control in forest conservation. They can work.
- Baja California peninsula oases: An agro-biodiversity of isolation and integration. Both too much and too little isolation are bad.
- Cultivated, caught, and collected: defining culturally appropriate foods in Tallé, Niger. …and integrating them into development.
- Wetlands in Europe: Perspectives for restoration of a lost paradise. Down to 20% and counting. Someone should count the crop wild relatives in them.
- Economic Resilience and Land use: The Cocoa Crisis in the Rio Cachoeira Catchment, Brazil. Diverse land use means more resilience.
- Priorities for biodiversity monitoring in Europe: A review of supranational policies and a novel scheme for integrative prioritization. Yeah, but doesn’t integrate crop wild relatives, does it?
Nibbles: Trees, Gates on CG, Gardens, NUS surveys, GMOs, Free range livestock, Tasty fish, Traditional potatoes
- Britain gets a tree seed bank. Wait, it didn’t already have one? St Helena seems to, sort of. And Cameroon. And why they’re needed more than ever; and more. Although in Brazil trees can be the bad guys.
- Bill Gates praises CIMMYT, and the CGIAR as a whole.
- A Renaissance garden recreated in NYC.
- A survey on moringa. And one on achocha and oca.
- And speaking of deconstructing weird crops, how about saffron?
- Yet another one of those GMOs-are-not-as-bad-as-you-think pieces. Is any of this getting through, I wonder?
- Free range pigs in Kenya and the USA.
- Speaking of free range livestock… Well, a species distantly related to livestock anyway. Oh, and here’s another restoration story, from another continent.
- Free range glass eels too. And salmon, after a fashion.
- Traditional potatoes in fancy Lima restaurants. Maybe with pork or fish?
Brainfood: Carrot domestication, Nigerian diets, Rotations & ecosystem services, Bangladeshi diets, Maize breeding sites, Olives and climate change, Mixtures and invertebrates, Genebank information systems
- Genetic structure and domestication of carrot (Daucus carota subsp. sativus) (Apiaceae). Origin in Central Asia, but no genetic bottleneck (sic).
- Data collection and assessment of commonly consumed foods and recipes in six geo-political zones in Nigeria: Important for the development of a National Food Composition Database and Dietary Assessment. Nigerians eat a lot of soup.
- The integration of crop rotation and tillage practices in the assessment of ecosystem services provision at the regional scale. Good trick if you can do it.
- Nutritional composition of minor indigenous fruits: Cheapest nutritional source for the rural people of Bangladesh. If only the rural people knew about this.
- Effectiveness of selection at CIMMYT’s main maize breeding sites in Mexico for performance at sites in Africa and vice versa. Is high. Phew.
- Olive trees as bio-indicators of climate evolution in the Mediterranean Basin. Olives in Germany by 2100?
- Crop genetic diversity benefits farmland biodiversity in cultivated fields. Mixed wheat fields better for soil invertebrate biodiversity than fields with single varieties.
- IT background of the medium-term storage of Martonvásár Cereal Genebank resources in phytotron cold rooms. The interesting thing is that the system links genebank data with breeders’ data. Don’t see that a lot.
Conserving Prunus africana?
I’ve been sitting on it for a while, but a paper which AoB Blog discussed back in January led me to uncover a whole load of stuff on Prunus africana. The African Cherry Tree does not rate a leaflet in the African Food Tree Species series, perhaps because it’s not a, well, food tree, but that doesn’t mean it’s not important.
Chemicals extracted from the tree’s bark are used in a range of pharmaceutical products to treat enlarged prostate (benign prostatic hyperplasia), an extremely common condition that affects up to half of men aged over 50.
Hence various efforts to develop sustainable harvesting methods. And also an interesting series of diversity and demographic studies:
- Phylogeography of the Afromontane Prunus africana reveals a former migration corridor between East and West African highlands: “The high genetic similarity found between western Uganda and west African populations indicates that a former Afromontane migration corridor may have existed through Equatorial Africa.”
- Structural diversity and regeneration of the endangered Prunus africana (Rosaceae) in Zimbabwe: “…poor regeneration, fewer P. africana trees in small and large size classes, dominance of positive height and diameter differentiation and high mingling.”
- Divergent pattern of nuclear genetic diversity across the range of the Afromontane Prunus africana mirrors variable climate of African highlands: “The observed patterns indicate divergent population history across the continent most likely associated to Pleistocene changes in climatic conditions. The high genetic similarity between populations of West Africa with population of East Africa west of the Eastern Rift Valley … provides further evidence for a historical migration route. Contrasting estimates of recent and historical gene flow indicate a shift of the main barrier to gene flow from the Lake Victoria basin to the Eastern Rift Valley…”
- Modelling the potential distribution of endangered Prunus africana (Hook.f.) Kalkm. in East Africa: “Prunus africana distribution is thus highly vulnerable to a warming climate and highlights the fact that both in-situ and ex-situ conservation will be a solution to global warming.”
Maybe we could do with some more seed behaviour data. But it would seem there is now plenty of diversity, demographic and sustainable harvesting information on which to base a comprehensive conservation strategy. Is someone coming up with one?