- Recreating Roman wine. It’s the tar, stupid.
- Decolonizing weed.
- Ancient Aboriginal foraging and cooking was quite something.
- The National Seed Bank at the Australian National Botanic Garden makes the news. See what I did there?
- So does sweetpotato in Kenya.
- Turning to art to find lost fruit varieties in Italy.
- Remembering Lee Calhoun of North American Fruit Explorers.
- Bringing back the quince. That’s the fruit trifecta.
- Might as well bring nutmeg back too.
- CIMMYT’s synthetic hexaploid wheat programme explained in a PowerPoint.
- Report on screening ICARDA’s wild forages.
- Nerd out with cool land cover map in Google Earth Engine. Mash up with above, for example?
Brainfood: Grassland diversity, Perennial crops, Ancient dates, Armenian grapes, Endangered trees, HLB sniffers, Household data, NUS, Phenotyping, Sorghum parasites, Wild Vigna, Ancient foods, Climate frontier
- Economic benefits from plant species diversity in intensively managed grasslands. More species means more milk, more money and less risk.
- Community structure of soil fungi in a novel perennial crop monoculture, annual agriculture, and native prairie reconstruction. Perennial monoculture not unlike native prairie.
- Origins and insights into the historic Judean date palm based on genetic analysis of germinated ancient seeds and morphometric studies. Ancient Judean dates may have come from further east.
- Genetic diversity and traditional uses of aboriginal grape (Vitis vinifera L.) varieties from the main viticultural regions of Armenia. 71 genotypes, no less.
- Mapping tree species vulnerability to multiple threats as a guide to restoration and conservation of tropical dry forests. About 50% of the distribution of 50 trees in northwestern Peru and southern Ecuador is vulnerable.
- Canine olfactory detection of a vectored phytobacterial pathogen, Liberibacter asiaticus, and integration with disease control. Dogs can sniff out a nasty citrus disease.
- The Rural Household Multiple Indicator Survey, data from 13,310 farm households in 21 countries. 758 variables, no less.
- Local Solutions for Sustainable Food Systems: The Contribution of Orphan Crops and Wild Edible Species. Increasing dietary diversity, more market opportunities for smallholders, and more attention to biodiversity conservation. Do orphan crops feature among the 758 variables above?
- Breeder friendly phenotyping. Focused, rapid and precise. Much like me, then?
- Genomics of sorghum local adaptation to a parasitic plant. Why we need on-farm conservation.
- Mapping patterns of abiotic and biotic stress resilience uncovers conservation gaps and breeding potential of Vigna wild relatives. Sources of resistance to biotic stresses are more common than to abiotic stresses, in terms of the number of species that have them.
- Archaeobotanical evidence of food plants in Northern Italy during the Roman period. Nice take-homes from Dr Lisa Lodwick on Twitter.
- The environmental consequences of climate-driven agricultural frontiers. Areas newly suitable for one or more crops store a lot of C, cover a lot of important watersheds and are home to a lot of biodiversity.
Nibbles: Trade & nutrition, Apple trifecta, Cider, Neolithic migrations, IIED double
- Getting trade to contribute to nutrition. Hard row to hoe.
- Elegiac introduction & postscript by Robert Macfarlane to a fabulous pean to wild Kazakhstan apples by the late, great Roger Deakin called East to Eden.
- And the connection between the above and “wild” apples in Scotland.
- An expensive poster showing how domesticated apple varieties relate to each other. I have to say I’m sorely tempted.
- Sorely tempted by this documentary on some cidermakers’ trip to Kazakhstan too.
- Nice to see my map of barley genebank accessions used in a blog post about mapping human DNA phylogenies.
- Your regular reminder that “PCLG is an international network of organisations coordinated by IIED that promotes learning on the linkages between people and biodiversity conservation” and that their newsletter is well worth subscribing too.
- And here are IIED’s best publications of 2019, including “Biodiversity loss is a development issue,” which is one of the great titles of our time, and not a bad paper either.
Brainfood: Ethiopian ABS, Horse double, Grapevine double, Naked barley, Sub clover diversity, Soybean diversity, USDA sorghum, Chicken diversity double, VAM, Oz wild rice
- Against the grain? A historical institutional analysis of access governance of plant genetic resources for food and agriculture in Ethiopia. Culture, economics and politics.
- Early Pastoral Economies and Herding Transitions in Eastern Eurasia. Everything changed around 1200 BC. Starting in Mongolia.
- Genetic diversity within and between British and Irish breeds: The maternal and paternal history of native ponies. Diversity within breeds being maintained, global haplotypes well represented, but a couple of breeds pretty unique. Long way from Mongolia.
- Diversity buffers winegrowing regions from climate change losses. Gotta change your cultivars.
- Contribution de la biodiversité à l’éco-oenotourisme des vignobles héroïques: atouts et perspectives. You can’t change your cultivars.
- Marker-assisted selection in a global barley (Hordeum vulgare subsp. vulgare) collection revealed a unique genetic determinant of the naked barley controlled by the nud locus. One genetic variant, from East Asia, makes barley naked.
- Morphological diversity within a core collection of subterranean clover (Trifolium subterraneum L.): Lessons in pasture adaptation from the wild. The Australian cultivars have similar morphological diversity to the core collection, and several morphological characters are probably adaptive.
- Genome-wide genetic diversity is maintained through decades of soybean breeding in Canada. After an initial decline, though, and there’s more out there.
- Evaluation of genetic diversity, agronomic traits, and anthracnose resistance in the NPGS Sudan Sorghum Core collection. 10% country subset of a 10% core subset of >40,000 accessions contains multiple anthracnose resistance sources, and lots of other diversity.
- Phylogeny and conservation priority assessment of Asian domestic chicken genetic resources. 7 clades, 3 centres of origin, northern Yunnan the highest priority for conservation.
- European and Asian contribution to the genetic diversity of mainland South American chickens. Alas, no evidence of a pre-Columbian Polynesian contribution. Yunnan, that’s another story.
- Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi affect the concentration and distribution of nutrients in the grain differently in barley compared with wheat. Differently as in opposite directions.
- Molecular and Morphological Divergence of Australian Wild Rice. Including a putative new taxon.
Nibbles: Costs edition
- What should food cost? Enough to support genebanks and breeding, natch.
- What would sustainable coffee cost? Including genebanks and breeding, I hope.
- And sustainable bananas? Including genebanks and breeding, of course.