- Dutch biodiversity fund to pay dividend in cheese. Gouda, presumably.
- Landraces save farmers from climate change, yada yada.
- Horse wild relative wilder than originally thought.
Home of the potato
Home of the potato, a set by PRI’s The World on Flickr.
Today’s PRI piece on how an old potato is helping Andean farmers cope with climate change also points to some fun spud photos (see above) which are in fact all of potatoes, unlike in the recent NatGeo disaster. And to a great video of CIP Director General Pamela Anderson eating chips (crisps), which she really shouldn’t do because they’re not very healthy (the chips, not the potatoes), but what the hell.
Protected areas in China: more and better needed
A big article in BioScience looks at the state of nature reserves in China, and finds them lacking. According to the press release:
Protected area managers in many cases currently lack basic data about which plant species are present on their reserves and even the exact area and extent of the reserves. Consequently, the effects of China’s rapid economic development, the related spread of invasive species, and the growth of tourism could drive to extinction species that could be sources of future crops and medicine.
Some things worth mentioning, from the article itself. ((I’ve made it available here because BioScience’s naming scheme means it won’t be available as easily next month.)) First, nice to see crop wild relatives getting a look in, although there is no mention of the agricultural biodiversity already being used by farmers either in the protected areas or outside them. Secondly, although the authors suggest preserving “very rare and threatened species” in some of China’s more than 140 botanic gardens, they don’t talk about conservation in genebanks, and they don’t talk about incentives for in-situ or on-farm conservation. In fact, the only incentives mentioned are those government should offer to persuade people to move out of the protected areas and into the cities.
So, once again, people are the problem. “Conflicts between the interests of rural communities and nature conservation need to be resolved,” and the way to do that is to move the people out of the way of conservation.
China has an opportunity to lead the world in developing a coherent conservation policy for plants important to agriculture, one that recognises the importance of diversity (as much Chinese agriculture has done), that integrates the various different forms of conservations, and that enlists the people who actually interact with plant diversity, manage it, even if only by default, and thus help to determine its future.
Brainfood: Community forestry, Chinese Paleolithic, Peanut wild relatives, Pepper taxonomy, Fruit tree domestication, Allelopathy, Olive evaluation
- Back to basics: Considerations in evaluating the outcomes of community forestry. You don’t need fancy indicators.
- Plant exploitation of the last foragers at Shizitan in the Middle Yellow River Valley China: Evidence from grinding stones. Remains of starch and patterns of wear on grinding stones show that Paleolithic people in China used a lot of plants, in a lot of ways.
- Phenotypic diversity and identification of wild Arachis accessions with useful agronomic and nutritional traits. Our friends at ICRISAT identify the top 20 wild peanut accessions.
- Taxonomy and genetic diversity of domesticated Capsicum species in the Andean region. AFLPs and SSRs clarify some taxonomic issues, but show high diversity not just in Bolivia, the putative centre of origin. No top 20 though.
- From forest to field: Perennial fruit crop domestication. They’re like annuals in some respects, different in others. Perhaps most interestingly, their domestication bottleneck wasn’t so much of one.
- Allelopathic potential of Triticum spp., Secale spp. and Triticosecale spp. and use of chromosome substitutions and translocations to improve weed suppression ability in winter wheat. Low in wheat, but high in some rye accessions, and transferrable.
- Genotyping and evaluation of local olive varieties of a climatically disfavoured region through molecular, morphological and oil quality parameters. Eight minor varieties could be less so.
Nibbles: Turkish trade, Coffee, Drought resistant crops, Diversification, Leafy veg, Taxonomy
- Shipwreck offers insights into agricultural trade in Turkey 1500 years ago.
- Coffee from alpha to omega.
- Drought-resistant crops for East Africa. Well, yes. And more specifically…
- “African” crops in America.
- Program to focus on making better use of vegetables. And that “program” has been going since 1986! Who knew?
- Why we should all be taxonomists.