- Global map and indicators of food system sustainability. Includes crop diversity, based on Khoury et al.
- Phenotyping and Plant Breeding: Overcoming the Barriers. Mostly comes down to good experimental design.
- The Spatial-Temporal Dynamics of Potato Agrobiodiversity in the Highlands of Central Peru: A Case Study of Smallholder Management across Farming Landscapes. Intensification and upward movement, while maintaining diversity.
- Diversity of a Large Collection of Natural Populations of Mango (Mangifera indica Linn.) Revealed by Agro-Morphological and Quality Traits. Lowish diversity, but not so low as to fail to provide year-round production.
- Intraspecific diversification of the crop wild relative Brassica cretica Lam. using demographic model selection. Diverse populations do not necessarily mean diverse adaptation.
- Crop Origins and Phylo Food: A database and a phylogenetic tree to stimulate comparative analyses on the origins of food crops. When and where current crops were domesticated.
- The climatic challenge: Which plants will people use in the next century? When and where future crops will be domesticated.
- Earth system impacts of the European arrival and Great Dying in the Americas after 1492. 56 million deaths.
- Multidimensional characterization of global food supply from 1961 to 2013. Animal-source foods + sugar up in the East, down in the West. Everybody’s eating their vegetables.
- Exploring solution spaces for nutrition-sensitive agriculture in Kenya and Vietnam. Could grown more, and different, vegetables.
- Evaluation of early vigor traits in wild olive germplasm. Potential as dwarfing rootstocks.
- Agronomic and biochemical evaluation of cassava clones with roots that have pink pulp. 2 of 9 from the Embrapa collection have potential.
- Management Practices and Breeding History of Varieties Strongly Determine the Fine Genetic Structure of Crop Populations: A Case Study Based on European Wheat Populations. Landraces show more intra-sample diversity than modern varieties. Wait, there must be more to it than that…
- High-resolution and bias-corrected CMIP5 projections for climate change impact assessments. 7 TB of data for your delectation, thanks to CGIAR.
Nibbles: Purple, Emirati bees, MJ Bale, Solanum jamesii, Olive genebank, Victoria genebank, Kampot pepper
- Murex from Meninx.
- Breeding a better bee.
- Menswear retailer to dabble in sustainable livestock.
- There was a fourth sister.
- A world olive collection in Spain.
- “If we can assume the fire pattern is as bad as the stuff we see on TV, I reckon at this very moment there is a goodly sized handful of species that are technically extinct right now.” At least in the wild.
- Cambodia’s world-beating peppercorn makes a post-post-colonial comeback.
Nibbles: USDA maize genebank, Apple breeding, Seed conservation, Soil map, Scoring supermarkets, DNA barcoding, Stone Age Hypoxis, Hybrid wine, Lost crops, Boswellia, Leucokaso, Species mixtures
- Nice student video on the genebank and breeding programmes at Iowa State.
- Speaking of breeding programmes and videos, here’s Sean Myles on his work on apples in Canada.
- Seed conservation legend Richard Ellis on what climate change is doing to seed quality.
- An amazing new global soil properties map is open for business.
- Scoring supermarkets for the human suffering they represent.
- The future of DNA barcoding…is here.
- Cotton 101.
- Strong evidence of Middle Stone Age tuber cooking in southern Africa.
- French wine growers dip a cautious toe into the grapewine interspecific genepool.
- Yields of mixtures of now “lost” native American crops comparable to those of maize.
- The canonical yearly frankincense story in honour of Epiphany.
- Biblical white olive makes a comeback in Italy.
- Useful update of mixture studies.
Brainfood: Cassava diversity, Landrace diversity double, Soybean oil quality, Cucurbit domestication, Carrot colours, Pharaonic emmer, Teosinte RILs, Chinese pigs, Brazilian apples, Teosinte diversity, Forests & diets, Forest productivity, Agricultural productivity
- A global overview of cassava genetic diversity. The African germplasm is different from the Latin American, but not by that much.
- Genetic variability in landraces populations and the risk to lose genetic variation. The example of landrace ‘Kyperounda’ and its implications for ex situ conservation. Better genetically to conserve landraces as sub-lines. But financially?
- Impact of merging commercial breeding lines on the genetic diversity of Landrace pigs. Above goes for pigs too.
- Selection and Molecular Characterization of Soybeans with High Oleic Acid from Plant Germplasm of Genebank. 3 accessions have interesting variants in the relevant gene.
- Origin and domestication of Cucurbitaceae crops: insights from phylogenies, genomics and archaeology. Lots of different paths to domestication, but all involve loss of flesh bitterness, one way or another.
- Changing Carrot Color: Insertions in DcMYB7 Alter the Regulation of Anthocyanin Biosynthesis and Modification. How the carrot lost its purple.
- A 3,000-year-old Egyptian emmer wheat genome reveals dispersal and domestication history. Most closely resembles modern material from Turkey, Oman and India.
- TeoNAM: A Nested Association Mapping Population for Domestication and Agronomic Trait Analysis in Maize. With added teosinte goodness.
- Adaptive phenotypic divergence in an annual grass differs across biotic contexts. The rhizosphere affects adaptation of teosinte along an altitudinal gradient. We’ll need a Nested Association Mapping Population for that too now, no doubt.
- Population genetics assessment model reveals priority protection of genetic resources in native pig breeds in China. Most breeds have low diversity; Tibetan pigs are an exception.
- A brief history of the forty-five years of the E’AppleBP apple breeding program in Brazil. 27 new varieties seems like pretty good going.
- Testing the Various Pathways Linking Forest Cover to Dietary Diversity in Tropical Landscapes. Sometimes there’s a direct pathway (e.g., consumption of forest food), sometimes an income pathway (income from forest products used to purchase food from markets), and sometimes an agroecological pathway (forests and trees sustaining farm production). And sometimes there isn’t.
- Evolutionary diversity is associated with wood productivity in Amazonian forests. “…greater phylogenetic diversity translates into higher levels of ecosystem function.” No word on its effect on diets.
- Anatomy and resilience of the global production ecosystem. Plenty of words on its effect on diets.
Nibbles: Saviour edition
- The Parque de la Papa will save us all.
- David Fairchild tried to save us all.
- Gardens in Florence and Warsaw team up to save citrus oddities.
- Save land through indigenous mapping.