- Prototypical versus contemporary Mediterranean Diet. They’re basically the same.
- Development of Oryza sativa L. by Oryza punctata Kotschy ex Steud. monosomic addition lines with high value traits by interspecific hybridization. A very distant relative finally succumbs.
- Local breeds – rural heritage or new market opportunities? Colliding views on the conservation and sustainable use of landraces. Apparently, both is not an answer. At least in Finland.
- Exploring Genetic Diversity in Plants Using High-Throughput Sequencing Techniques. No excuse now.
- Extremophyte adaptations to salt and water deficit stress. Any crop wild relatives, though?
- Seed wars and farmers’ rights: comparative perspectives from Brazil and India. Stewardship vs ownership.
- Quantifying the economic contribution of wild food harvests to rural livelihoods: A global-comparative analysis. Three quarters of rural families use wild foods, but their contribution to income averages only 4%. Must be the nutrition, I guess.
Nibbles: Wild pig, Indicators, Ethiopian agrobiodiversity, Traditional crops, Purple haze, Fraises des Bois, Chef prize, Breadfruit, Sorghum nutrition, Moringa, NWFP, Barcoding, Arnold Arboretum
- Warty pig saved by genomics.
- So apparently there’s a Biodiversity Barometer. Via the Biodiversity Indicator Partnership.
- Traditional crops survive, but under threat, in Ethiopian highlands. And a whole issue of Farming Matters on why it’s important that they do survive.
- More on that purple wheat heirloom variety coming back from the brink.
- Going back to the original European strawberry. No, I’m not going to make any jokes about that.
- There’s going to be a Nobel for chefs. If they can make use of breadfruit, they’ll deserve it.
- Yes, sorghum rotis can taste good. And they’re good for you.
- Big Moringa shill makes case for next superfood :)
- Did I already say that FAO’s Nonwood Forest Products Newsletter seems to have been resurrected? Do subscribe.
- On my work blog, I say genebanks could be a bit more like supermarkets.
- Collecting trees.
Brainfood: Panicum diversity, Colocasia diversity, First farmers, Maize breeding, Soil data, Prunus domestication, Soya minicore
- Evaluation of Genetic Diversity of Proso Millet Germplasm Available in the United States using Simple-Sequence Repeat Markers. Germplasm collection diverse, released cultivars not so much.
- Genetic Diversification and Dispersal of Taro (Colocasia esculenta (L.) Schott). Most diverse in India, which is origin of W. African material, in contrast to the S. African, which comes from Japan. The Caribbean stuff comes from the Pacific, but the Central American from India.
- The genetic structure of the world’s first farmers. Ancient DNA suggests agriculture arose separately in southern Levant and Iran. Or at least that the first farmers in those regions didn’t speak together much.
- Current warming will reduce yields unless maize breeding and seed systems adapt immediately. Crop duration in Africa will decrease faster than you can breed for it.
- Uncertainty in soil data can outweigh climate impact signals in global crop yield simulations. And then there’s the whole soil thing.
- Evolutionary genomics of peach and almond domestication. Separated a long time ago, and fruit diverged before domestication, which occurred separately but in parallel.
- Phenotypic evaluation and genetic dissection of resistance to Phytophthora sojae in the Chinese soybean mini core collection. Some new genes found, and geographic hotspots of resistance too.
Brainfood: Maize domestication, Eastern European grazing, Silk Road, Hybridization, European agroforestry, Japanese pears
- Recent demography drives changes in linked selection across the maize genome. Only a small part of teosinte contributed to maize.
- Changing year-round habitat use of extensively grazing cattle, sheep and pigs in East-Central Europe between 1940 and 2014: Consequences for conservation and policy. Animals don’t graze as much, or the same habitats, as they used to, which may not be altogether good for conservation of either plants or livestock because grazing was an important management intervention for thousands of years.
- Between China and South Asia: A Middle Asian corridor of crop dispersal and agricultural innovation in the Bronze Age. Wheat goes east, millets go west.
- Hybridization and extinction. Genetic swamping can happen, but hybridization can rescue a species too.
- Do European agroforestry systems enhance biodiversity and ecosystem services? A meta-analysis. Yes.
- Estimation of loss of genetic diversity in modern Japanese cultivars by comparison of diverse genetic resources in Asian pear (Pyrus spp.). The modern cultivars are variations on “Nijisseiki.”
Brainfood: Agricultural heritage, Unique maize, B4N, Flax core evaluation, Oca conservation, Ag expansion, Rose wild relative, Quinoa evaluation, Nepal seed systems, Amazonian domestication, Analysing germplasm data
- Agricultural Heritage Systems: A Bridge between Urban and Rural Development. “…agricultural heritage systems can take full advantage of abundant funds…” Really?
- Multi cob-bearing popcorn (Puakzo) maize: a unique landrace of Mizoram, North East, India. Would be nice to know how unique globally.
- Enabled or disabled: Is the environment right for using biodiversity to improve nutrition? Maybe, in some places.
- Orbitide Composition of Flax Core Collection (FCC). In other news, Canada has a flax core collection.
- Farmer Perspectives on OCA (Oxalis tuberosa; Oxalidaceae) Diversity Conservation: Values and Threats. It’s the cultural value, stupid. And weevils.
- The expansion of modern agriculture and global biodiversity decline: an integrated assessment. Fancy maths shows that if you assume that unabated agricultural expansion is bad in a particular way, you can come up with a model which spares land at a modest cost to per capita consumption, given decent investment in research.
- Nuclear genetic variation of Rosa odorata var. gigantea (Rosaceae): population structure and conservation implications. Wild relative of domesticated rose shows lots of diversity and two distinct populations either side of a fault zone in China.
- Worldwide Evaluation of Quinoa: Preliminary Results from Post International Year of Quinoa FAO Projects in 9 Countries. 19 sites, 21 genotypes, a few winners. But the real story is how difficult it was to get hold of the material in the first place.
- Shaping Seed Regulation in Nepal: The Role of Networks, Community and Informality. The formal needs to recognize the informal. And vice versa.
- Crop domestication in the upper Madeira River basin. Nice, brief review of evidence of domestication for a number of crops along one branch of the Amazon.
- Analysing genebank collections using “R”: Making trait information widely available to users. NordGen takes genebank data analysis to the masses. And about time too.