Fruits and nuts

November 10, 2026November 10, 2026

The plot thickens

I’m slowly making my way through the open access book “Sustainable Agroecology: Actors, Practices, Experiences and Perceptions,” edited by Javier Becerril García, Paulina Martínez Isidro, Praveen Jha, Elisabeth Tuider, and Andreas Thiel. It’s like 300 pages, so I may be some time.

The book brings together 15 case studies from different authors around the world exploring how agroecological approaches can support rural livelihoods and nutrition, while sustaining agricultural diversity, local knowledge and cultures. Several chapters highlight the role of farmers, particularly women, in maintaining traditional varieties through seed selection, saving and exchange.

One describes the Maya milpa system in Yucatán, where the Three Sisters — maize, beans and squash — are grown alongside other crops and managed as part of a wider landscape of home gardens, fallows and forests. Another examines the remarkable diversity of Mexican home gardens, which can contain more than a hundred plant species and serve as reservoirs of useful plants, many of them threatened.

A particularly interesting example comes from Chiapas, where a group of Indigenous women, the “Guardians of the Seeds”, established a community seed store and organised the conservation and exchange of native crops, combining traditional knowledge with technical support. The book also looks at the revival of underutilised crops in Europe, including bere barley in Orkney and local bean and wheat varieties in Italy and Greece, showing how new markets can help bring neglected diversity back into cultivation.

The authors have relatively little to say about formal genebanks — but that’s ok. The contribution of the book is to underline what genebanks cannot do alone: maintain the knowledge, seed systems, markets and farming practices that keep crop diversity in use and allow it to continue evolving.

November 3, 2026November 4, 2026

An eclectic menu from Jeremy

Jeremy’s latest Eat This Newsletter serves up “miracle wheat,” blue mangoes, and Yemeni coffee. Quite the snack. Check it out. And if the blue mango thing sounds vaguely familiar, we Nibbled it here a few weeks back.

November 2, 2026November 2, 2026

Brainfood: iNaturalist, Agroforestry mapping, Crop mapping, Intercrop mapping, Smartphone phenotyping, Bean phenology, Rice phenology, Grape database

Guidelines and best practices for the scientific use of global iNaturalist data. Citizen scientists have generated an enormous photographic record of biodiversity, but turning those observations into reliable scientific data requires some care. Here’s some practical guidance on accessing and using iNaturalist records and images, addressing taxonomic uncertainty, geoprivacy, observer bias, attribution and reproducibility.
Mapping the spatial extent of agroforestry lands across Africa by characterizing tree spatial arrangements. Moving from individual biodiversity observations to the landscape, this study uses remote sensing to identify agroforestry across Africa by looking at the spatial arrangement of trees.
AI tool for mapping smallholder crops proves itself in Senegal. Once we know where trees and agricultural landscapes are, the next question is what is actually being grown. Here researchers use Tessera, an open-source AI model trained on satellite imagery, to identify different crops in smallholder systems, achieving 84% accuracy while requiring considerably less computing power and labelled training data than other approaches.
National Mapping of Monoculture and Intercropped Maize via Phenology-Assisted Sampling: Application in Kenya. Mapping crops is one thing; distinguishing how they are grown is another. This study distinguished intercropped from monocropped maize in smallholder farming systems, using satellite time series and phenological information to generate training samples for machine-learning classification.
Smartphone-based proximal sensing as an accessible platform for improved physiological phenotyping. From mapping whole agricultural landscapes we move to the research station, and from satellites to smartphones. Using a smartphone to capture repeated images of plants in cowpea plots generated high-resolution time series, from which could be extracted information on vegetative growth, flowering and pod production.
Determination of dry bean physiological maturity from UAS RGB time series using a stacking ensemble of color-derived spectral features. The cowpea study shows what can be extracted from repeated close-range images of individual plants. Here the emphasis shifts to using drone-mounted cameras to estimate a specific breeding trait: physiological maturity in dry beans. Combining colour-based indicators with time-series features and machine learning achieved a prediction error of only 2.68 days.
Multi-scale spatial-temporal remote sensing fusion for phenology identification in rice germplasm resources. If maturity can be estimated from drone imagery in dry beans, can similar approaches monitor hundreds of different rice genotypes in a breeding collection? Apparently yes, by combining frequent medium-resolution images with less frequent high-resolution UAV imagery.
Digitalization of the genotypic and phenotypic information retained within the FEM grapevine germplasm bank. We end where phenotyping meets conservation. The Fondazione Edmund Mach grapevine collection brings together more than 3,000 accessions, with genetic identity assessed using microsatellite markers and phenotypic characterisation covering vine development, ampelographic traits and responses to biotic stresses. The paper describes the digitisation of this information in FEMVitisDB, a FAIR-compliant database with links to international data infrastructures. And not a drone in sight. Yet

October 21, 2026October 21, 2026

Nibbles: Standing variation, Indigenous dogs, Austrian apples, Jordanian olive oil, Island foods

Ancient farmers didn’t have to wait for the genetic diversity that made domestication possible. They selected from variation already present in wild plants, including the ancestors of rice and maize. Domestication was as much about spotting (or happening upon) useful differences as creating new ones.
English colonists in America called Indigenous dogs “wolves,” revealing as much about colonial perceptions as about the animals themselves. This history of Indigenous dogs shows how unfamiliar animals were classified through peculiarly European ideas about wildness.
Austria is bringing forgotten apple varieties back to life. Saving old varieties in genebanks is one thing: getting people to grow, sell and eat them is another, but it can be done. Or at least tried.
Jordan’s olive-oil heritage centres on traditional varieties such as Nabali and ancient Rumi trees, but most production is consumed locally, leaving exports limited and making provenance, cultivar and harvest date important indicators for buyers. Compare and contrast with Austrian apples.
Small island developing states have distinctive food cultures and ingredients, but face particular challenges in building sustainable and resilient food systems. FAO’s A Taste of SIDS explores the connections between island food, biodiversity and culinary heritage. Nice to see diversity within crops considered, though a few local variety names would have been nice.

October 19, 2026October 19, 2026

The gourd, the bred and the citrus

Jeremy’s latest newsletter includes a link to a piece on the domestication of cucurbits¹ that reminded him of a classic of evolutionary biology and reminded me that I meant to link to The Botanist in the Kitchen’s own autumnal foray into Halloween pumpkins et al. It also alerted me to what promises to be a phenomenal eight-part exploration of citrus diversity in Sicily by Erik Grouger.