- New(ish) website for the Peruvian national genebank.
- WorldVeg genebank reaches out to Southeast Asia.
- CIMMYT genebank reaches out at COP15.
- Nigerian national genebank gets advice.
- USDA’s genebank at the University of Georgia makes it into the local paper.
- Shout-out for community seedbanks in Mexico, or Fondos de Semillas Familiares actually. National genebank unavailable for comment.
- All well and good, but genebanks need a Resilient Seed Systems Shared Action Framework.
- And, of course, they are complementary to in situ/on farm conservation. How exactly does that work? Let Dr Nigel Maxted tell you. For an hour.
Happy Food Diversity Day!
On Friday January 13th, from 9am to 7.30pm, some of the UK’s leading scientists, writers, chefs, farmers, campaigners and entrepreneurs will be taking part in a continuous feed of discussions, storytelling and information sharing – all about the wonders and importance of food diversity. These discussions will be made available for free via Eventbrite, live-streamed on YouTube and available to view after the event. Explore the resources for each of the sessions here.
This seems to be the brainchild of Dan Saladino, who recently published the wonderful Eating to Extinction.
LATER: And then there’s this talk from the Seed Detective on the 25th to round things off.
Nibbles: Fancy fungus, Fancy CWR book, Fancy dataset, Fancy food, Fancy wheat collection, Fancy diet, Fancy seeds, Fancy agriculture
- Symbiotic fungus can help plants and detoxify methylmercury.
- Very attractive book on the wild tomatoes of Peru. I wonder if any of them eat heavy metals.
- There’s a new dataset on the world’s terrestrial ecosystems. I’d like to know which one has the most crop wild relative species per unit area. Has anyone done that calculation? They must have.
- Iran sets up a saffron genebank. Could have sworn they already had one.
- The Natural History Museum digs up some old wheat samples, the BBC goes a bit crazy with it.
- Paleolithic diets included plants. Maybe not wheat or saffron though.
- Community seedbanks are all the rage in Odisha.
- Seeds bring UK and South Africa closer together. Seeds in seedbanks. Not community seedbanks, perhaps, but one can hope.
- Can any of the above make agriculture any more nutrition-sensitive? I’d like to think yes. Maybe except for the mercury-eating fungus, though you never know…
Brainfood: Silkworm, Donkey, Cat, Chicken, Neolithic, Shamans, Locusts
- High-resolution silkworm pan-genome provides genetic insights into artificial selection and ecological adaptation. The silkworm was domesticated 5000 years ago in the middle Yellow River (along with millets?), but was improved independently and in different directions in China and Japan.
- The genomic history and global expansion of domestic donkeys. The donkey was domesticated in the Horn of Africa 7000 years ago and then developed in different directions in Africa and Eurasia. Covered in the NY Times, no less.
- Your horse is a donkey! Identifying domesticated equids from Western Iberia using collagen fingerprinting. Turns out you can tell horses and donkeys apart easily and cheaply from ancient collagen in archaeological remains.
- Genetics of randomly bred cats support the cradle of cat domestication being in the Near East. Humans were domesticated by cats in the eastern Mediterranean basin about 12,000 years ago.
- The history of the domestic cat in Central Europe. Wait, the Near Eastern wildcat, from which all domestic cats are derived, could have been in central Europe before the Neolithic.
- Missing puzzle piece for the origins of domestic chickens. Recent dating of chicken domestication from archaeological remains in Thailand at 1650–1250 BC underestimates the timescale. By a lot.
- Was the Fishing Village of Lepenski Vir Built by Europe’s First Farmers? And did they have cats?
- Shamanism at the transition from foraging to farming in Southwest Asia: sacra, ritual, and performance at Neolithic WF16 (southern Jordan). You need shamans to help you cope with all that animal domestication.
- Contributions of black locust (Robinia pseudoacacia L.) to livelihoods of peri-urban dwellers in the Free State Province of South Africa. Wait, black locusts are not animals? Hmm, they do seem to have some things in common with cats though.
Nibbles: Svalbard Global Seed Vault, Hemp collection, Community seedbank, Turkish national genebank, Olive park, Pillas, CIMMYT genebank
- A Canadian take on Svalbard.
- A Texas take on hemp conservation.
- A Zimbabwean take on community seedbanks.
- A Turkish take on genebanks.
- An Italian take on olive conservation.
- A Cornish take on heirloom oats.
- A Chinese take on the CIMMYT genebank.