- Baby ginger, if you can offer tropical conditions and want to make money.
- ILRI beefs about the lack of interest in livestock in the run-up to Rio+20.
- Teachers! A resource! What Are Seed Gene Banks and How Do They Work?
- Farmer unthreatened by GMOs grows organic seed for others.
- Botanist documents flowers of (one kind of) pawpaw.
- Woman takes a trip down memory lane during visit to citrus field genebank.
- Ethiopians improve their food security with roots and tubers. Wot, no bananas?
Nibbles: Domesticating fruit trees, Plains Indians, Weedy rice, Prize, Maize festivals, Ifugao, Bangladeshi diets, Pacific hopes, Plant patents
- Domesticating fruit trees for food and profit. But why the “scare quotes” around clone?
- Indians 101: Northern Plains Agriculture.
- A different kind of weedy wild relative; feral rice.
- Great, innovative agricultural scientist? Prizes await you.
- Mexico’s corn festivals celebrate diversity – but why bring opposition to GMOs into it?
- Project to help the people who created and manage the Ifugao rice terraces to cope with climate change. Stay tuned.
- Project to “diversify … diets to improve nutrition and incomes in Bangladesh”. Stay tuned.
- And countries of the Pacific look to crop diversity to manage climate variability. Stay tuned.
- Can a farmer commit patent infringement just by planting soybeans he bought on the open market? Good question; stay tuned.
Brainfood: Medicinal plants, Einkorn diversity, Chestnut diversity, Leeks etc, Phylogenetic diversity
- The Use of Phylogeny to Interpret Cross-Cultural Patterns in Plant Use and Guide Medicinal Plant Discovery: An Example from Pterocarpus (Leguminosae. It’s kinda like parallel evolution.
- Genetic diversity in the Red wild einkorn: T. urartu Gandilyan (Poaceae: Triticeae). Northwest Syria and South Turkey contain the most genetic diversity, and genetic similarity is not a proxy for geographic closeness.
- Castanea spp. biodiversity conservation: collection and characterization of the genetic diversity of an endangered species. Overview of a 7-year project to conserve and study sweet chestnut diversity.
- Diversity in Allium ampeloprasum: from small and wild to large and cultivated. The continuing, complex saga of onion, leek and garlic evolution. It’s about heterozygosity, rathen than ploidy.
- Phylogenetic diversity promotes ecosystem stability. How crazy is that!
Nibbles: Goats, Seed Fairs, Banana genebank, Prunus africana plans, Forage grass, English food, Talking heads
- USAID and partners to probe African goat breeds for performance measures.
- FAO sings the praises of its seed fairs in South Sudan.
- Bioversity’s banana genebank gets a big write-up.
- Prunus africana, the aged gentleman’s friend, could also be the Kenyan farmers’ friend. In about 40 years time. If we start now.
- And speaking of domestication, efforts to tame Panicum turgidum as a new forage grass are under way.
- It wasn’t industrialisation that made English food bad, no matter what a Nobel Laureate may think.
- All that #abdchat, just in case you missed it live.
Brainfood: Dietary diversity, Diversity and diseases, Soil IK, Insect symbionts, Rhizobia, Wild lettuce, Tree genetic erosion, Pre-domestication barley, Strampelli
- Relating dietary diversity and food variety scores to vegetable production and socio-economic status of women in rural Tanzania. Dietary diversity was all too often alarmingly low, and when it was it was associated with seasonal fluctuations in the production and collecting of vegetables. But a more varied diet need not necessarily be healthier, so more procedural sophistication will be necessary in follow-up studies.
- A risk-minimizing argument for traditional crop varietal diversity use to reduce pest and disease damage in agricultural ecosystems of Uganda. For Musa and beans, more varietal diversity meant less damage and less variation in damage.
- Exploring farmers’ local knowledge and perceptions of soil fertility and management in the Ashanti Region of Ghana. Soils which farmers described as being more fertile were, ahem, more fertile.
- Population genetics of beneficial heritable symbionts. Of insects, that is. Important because they can confer protection from natural enemies, among other things. They behave a bit, but not entirely, like beneficial nuclear mutations.
- Widespread fitness alignment in the legume–rhizobium symbiosis. There are no cheaters.
- Genetic polymorphism in Lactuca aculeata populations and occurrence of natural putative hybrids between L. aculeata and L. serriola. Not much diversity in Israel, surprisingly. But isozymes?
- Meta-Analysis of Susceptibility of Woody Plants to Loss of Genetic Diversity through Habitat Fragmentation. The standard story — that trees suffer less genetic erosion because they are long-lived — is apparently wrong, even for wind pollinated trees.
- Large-scale cereal processing before domestication during the tenth millennium cal BC in northern Syria. “This was a community dedicated to the systematic production of food from wild cereals.”
- Nazareno Strampelli, the ‘Prophet’ of the green revolution. Before Norman, there was Nazareno.
- The memory remains: application of historical DNA for scaling biodiversity loss. Historical collections of salmon scales reveal many connections between modern evolutionary significant units (ESUs) in the Columbia River and old ones; but also, intriguingly, some differences.