- All about the International Treaty on PGRFA.
- More, much more, on that climate change hotspots study.
- IDRC on climate change adaptation in Africa. Almost nothing on agricultural diversity as a coping mechanism.
- Unlike this.
- Or this, for that matter. Never knew the Basque country was such a hotbed of potato research.
- Or…oh forget it.
- What, in the name of all that is happy, is hopniss?
- Danone buys some goodwill.
- Fairtrade chocolate: this looks like it should be really important. Is it?
- So, you say you want to know what plant remains were found in the baskets in Tutankhamun’s tomb?
- Bolivian agricultural biodiversity, anyone?
Brainfood: Baby’s veggies, Chickpea and drought, Vine cactus breeding, Paleolithic rabbits, California protected areas, Wild pigeonpea, Pecorino classification, Milk composition, Phenotyping, Wild peas
- Vegetables by Stealth: an exploratory study investigating the introduction of vegetables in the weaning period. Sneaking them into the diet is the most common strategy used by mothers to introduce their kids to vegetables. Reeeeeally?
- Assessment of Iranian chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) germplasms for drought tolerance. Four out of 150 local landraces showed promise. It really is a numbers game, isn’t it?
- In situ induction of chromosome doubling in vine cacti (Cactaceae). Potentially valuable autopolyploids were produced. Not that it was easy or anything.
- Who brought in the rabbits? Taphonomical analysis of Mousterian and Solutrean leporid accumulations from Gruta Do Caldeirão (Tomar, Portugal). People did, that’s who, but only during the later Upper Paleolithic. Before that it was mainly owls.
- Protected areas in climate space: What will the future bring? Nothing good. Both novel and disappearing climates are over-represented in current protected areas, at least in California.
- Progress in the utilization of Cajanus platycarpus (Benth.) Maesen in pigeonpea improvement. Baby steps.
- Classification of pecorino cheeses using electronic nose combined with artificial neural network and comparison with GC-MS analysis of volatile compounds. Wait, there are different kinds of pecorino?
- The need for country specific composition data on milk. Well, you’ve got me convinced.
- Rate-distortion tradeoff to optimize high-throughput phenotyping systems. Application to X-ray images of seeds. So, let me get this straight, basically, gauging the optimal trade-off between speed and accuracy in high-throughput phenotyping systems depends on what you’re measuring? Who writes these grant applications?
- Experimental growing of wild pea in Israel and its bearing on Near Eastern plant domestication. First pea growers were either very patient or very quick workers.
The mother-in-law and the Useful Tree Species for Africa
ICRAF have a nifty new tool out called “Useful Tree Species for Africa.” I’ve been playing around with it and I have to say it’s impressive. Not altogether easy to use, but impressive. If you’re at all into using native trees in Africa — for whatever reason or purpose — you’ll want to explore it. Here’s a taste of what it can do.
You download the kmz files from the ICRAF website and open them in Google Earth. 1 Then you think of somewhere you’re interested in. In my case, as usual in these situations, I chose the site of the mother-in-law’s spread above Limuru in Kenya. Useful Tree Species for Africa first tells you what sort of vegetation is potentially found there, according to White’s iconic Vegetation Map of Africa.
In this case, it’s “M19a Undifferentiated Afromontane vegetation (viii AMCE)”. What does that mean? Well, there’s a hyperlink which gives you more information on Mapping Unit 19a:
Crucially, this page, which opens in Google Earth, includes more hyperlinks, to four different species tables. Say you are interested in tree species found in this sort of vegetation that can support honey production. You click on the hyperlink labelled “Mapping unit 19a_uses.xls.” That in turn opens an Excel spreadsheet with a list of about 50 tree species and lots of different types of uses. You sort the species on “Bee fodder” and you get a shortlist of about 17 species, from Albizia gummifera to Syzygium guineense. Clicking yet again, this time on the species name, takes you to the PROTA page on the tree, with lots more information. Now, what would be really cool in due course would be a cross-link to ICRAF’s Tree Seed Suppliers Directory, so that you could work out where to get seed of your useful tree.
As I say, nifty. Lots of clicking, and opening of webpages, and of spreadsheets, and of more webpages, but you do end up with the information you want. If your query is place-based rather than species-based, that is. I don’t think the tool will let you start with a useful tree and work out where you can grow it, rather than start with a place and work out what can grow there. But let me play around with it a bit more. Maybe I’m wrong.
Nibbles: Date palm sex, Heirlooms congress, World Camel Day, Latino livestock, Coconut craft, Hybridizing Alocasia, Sami reindeer, Serbian agri-environments, Honey, Feidherbia
- Qataris work out how to sex date palms.
- The National Heirloom Exposition revs its engine.
- World Camel Day is coming up. No, really.
- Latin Americans planning their next congress on the biodiversity of domestic animals. Cuy, anyone?
- The Art of Coconut Craft. Wonderfully kitschy.
- So, you want to breed Alocasia, do you?
- Sweden stops oppressing its main minority.
- High Nature Value farming in Serbia.
- Non-wood forest products are all very well, but…
- Yes, yes, Feidherbia will solve all the problems of the Sahel, now can I go back to sleep?
Brainfood: Cabbages, Crops in Darfur, Sowing dates, People and biodiversity, Honeybees, Rhizobium, Figs, Urban ag, Wild olives, Ancient textiles, Ducks, Wheat introgression, Food citizenship, Crop models, Trifolium, Variety choice
- Genetic diversity of Brassica oleracea var. capitata gene bank accessions assessed by AFLP. Czech genebank; subgroups reflected place of origin.
- Optimizing the cropping mix in North Darfur State, Sudan. A study of Umkdada district. “…the results of the model were different from the real practices of the farmers.” Oh dear. To improve the fit, schoolboys should work in the fields more. And crops should fetch more. The dismal science indeed.
- Climate-driven simulation of global crop sowing dates. Ok, this model works. You can predict sowing dates under rainfed conditions for various annual crops from climatic conditions. Not entirely sure why you would want to, though.
- Exploring some of the myths of land use change: Can rural to urban migration drive declines in biodiversity? Yes, counter-intuitively, at least in the forests of Mexico’s southwestern highlands. More from Conservation Magazine.
- Pollination services in the UK: How important are honeybees? Quite a bit, but maybe not as much as previously thought. It’s the wild bees, stupid!
- Genetic diversity and symbiotic effectiveness of rhizobia isolated from root nodules of Phaseolus vulgaris L. grown in soils of Iran. It is high, and it varies, respectively.
- Interspecific hybridization of fig (Ficus carica L.) and Ficus erecta Thunb., a source of Ceratocystis canker resistance. It’s a breakthrough!
- Exploring the diversity of urban and peri-urban agricultural systems in Sudano-Sahelian West Africa: An attempt towards a regional typology. There are 6 types. Not 5; not 7. On this one, the journey is more interesting than the destination.
- Variability of wild olives (Olea europaea subsp. europaea var. sylvestris) analyzed by agro-morphological traits and SSR markers. There’s a lot of variabzzzzzzzzzz…
- Hemp in ancient rope and fabric from the Christmas Cave in Israel: Talmudic background and DNA sequence identification. Mainly flax, but some hemp, from both Roman and Chalcolithic periods. But can you smoke it?
- Modelling the distribution of domestic ducks in Monsoon Asia. Low resolution data, plus fancy modelling, can be used to get pretty good high resolution predictions.
- Gene flow between wheat and wild relatives: empirical evidence from Aegilops geniculata, Ae. neglecta and Ae. triuncialis. It happens, a lot.
- Toward food system sustainability through school food system change: Think&EatGreen@School and the making of a community-university research alliance. Food citizenship?
- Simulation of winter wheat yield and its variability in different climates of Europe: A comparison of eight crop growth models. Big differences among models, so best thing to do is to use the mean of all of them.
- The potential of plant viruses to promote genotypic diversity via genotype × environment interactions. The negative effect of White Clover Mosaic Virus (WCMV) infection on performance differs from white clover genotype to genotypes, which means differential selection, which means negative frequency-dependent selection in host populations, which means diversity. Via.
- Amplifying the benefits of agroecology by using the right cultivars. Why should we summarize, when an author has already done so?