- Gardening pioneer says “Be as diverse as possible!“
- Frank Elderson, Member of the Executive Board of the ECB and Vice-Chair of the Supervisory Board of the ECB, says businesses should be as biodiverse as possible.
- CGIAR and FARA launch an initiative to transform agriculture in Africa but the role of biodiversity is unclear.
- Maybe they should embrace the Agrobiodiversity Index, now that it has won a big prize.
- Speaking of agricultural biodiversity and prizes, here’s a podcast on the EXARC Experimental Archaeology Award winning project “Investigating the Origin of the Common Bean in the New World.”
- A trio of pieces on agrobiodiverse products: sake, mezcal, Kernza.
- Don’t forget fish need to be as diverse as possible too.
- Ok, not agriculture-related, but this visual essay on finding the tallest tree in the Amazon is really cool.
- Not so cool: some species you can only see in natural history collections. The world is not as diverse as possible.
Brainfood: Domestication treble, Introgression treble, Biodiversity mapping double, Oak conservation, Niche modelling double
- Plant domestication: setting biological clocks. Domestication changed plants’ timekeeping and made them less resilient, but there is variation among the biological clocks of different organs that could tapped in breeding.
- Plant domestication and agricultural ecologies. There have been 7 main paths to plant domestication, or commonalities in the ways that plants were domesticated by people in different parts of the world in the past: ecosystem engineering, ruderal, tuber, grain, segetal, fibre, fruit tree.
- Plants cultivated for ecosystem restoration can evolve toward a domestication syndrome. Ok, maybe 8.
- Diamonds in the Not-So-Rough: Wild Relative Diversity Hidden in Crop Genomes. The cool alleles you spotted in wild relatives may already be in cultivated genomes, and that can save breeders some time and effort.
- Finding needles in a haystack: identification of inter-specific introgressions in wheat genebank collections using low-coverage sequencing data. Ah, here they are.
- Interspecific common bean population derived from Phaseolus acutifolius using a bridging genotype demonstrate useful adaptation to heat tolerance. I guess this is an example of the time that could be saved.
- Mapping potential conflicts between global agriculture and terrestrial conservation. A third of agricultural production occurs in sites of high biodiversity conservation priority, with cattle, maize, rice, and soybean posing the greatest threat and sugar beet, pearl millet, and sunflower the lowest. No word on how many crop wild relatives are threatened, but there’s a cool online mapping tool that could I suppose be used to mash things up.
- Assessing habitat diversity and potential areas of similarity across protected areas globally. At a pinch, this could be used to identify backups for any threatened sites of high biodiversity conservation priority.
- Ex situ conservation of two rare oak species using microsatellite and SNP markers. Watch out for the creeping domestication syndrome though, if these ever get used for restoration :)
- TreeGOER: a database with globally observed environmental ranges for 48,129 tree species. Even more than all the CWRs we did. But no, I don’t know if those oaks are included…
- Ecological Niche Models using MaxEnt in Google Earth Engine: Evaluation, guidelines and recommendations. …but if not you can always work their ranges out for yourself.
Nibbles: AGRA, National security, Filipino fruits, Scuba rice, Tasteless pea, Blue Jay bean, Taiwan genebanks, Agrobiodiversity walks
- NGOs call on USAID to stop supporting AGRA. And not for the first time either.
- Report calls for US to invest more in agricultural research in support of global food security. AGRA unavailable for comment.
- A pean to the fruit trees of the Philippines. I’ll second that.
- Scuba rice comes to Africa. What took it so long?
- Apparently there’s a “wild pea plant” in India in which the flavour gene is turned off, and that’s a good thing. Going to have to look into this.
- A famous Canadian bean makes a come-back. Of course there are famous Canadian beans. More famous than that tasteless pea anyway.
- Nice piece on Taiwan’s crop genebanks. Lots of famous varieties in there no doubt.
- I really like the concept of “agrobiodiversity walks.” There should be one built around that wild tasteless pea.
Nibbles: Iron beans, Tree projects, Lablab genome, Tree collection management, Italian cooking, Replacing ugali, Gene-edited teff, Communicating plant breeding, Plant diseases, Sustainable intensification, Transforming African ag, Ag research investment, Saving seeds, Ukraine genebank
- Jeremy continues to dig deep into biofortification, and is not happy with what he finds out about iron-rich beans.
- Maybe he’ll donate to one of CIFOR-ICRAF’s nutrition-flavoured tree projects instead.
- Don’t worry, maybe lablab can be biofortified now that we have its genome.
- Speaking of trees, if you want to plant one in a particular botanic garden or arboretum, is it likely to thrive, now and in the future? Find out using the BGCI Climate Assessment Tool.
- Speaking of botanic gardens and arboreta, here are some resources on how they manage their tree collections.
- Prof. Alberto Grandi debunks the many myths of Italian cuisine.
- Christine Gatwiri doesn’t think maize can be replaced in Kenyan cuisine. I just hope it can be replaced in Italian cuisine.
- Will gene-edited teff finds its way into Ethiopian cuisine? And would it be a bad thing if it did? It depends on being open about it I guess…
- … so let’s remind ourselves of some ways plant breeding can usefully engage with the public, shall we?
- And let’s also remind ourselves that plant breeding is necessary, for example to protect our food supply against diseases. The Guardian has receipts.
- Prof. Glenn Denning doubles down on the whole better-maize-seeds-plus-fertilizer thing in Africa, but adds some greenery. In more senses than one. So yes, trees are allowed. And maybe even lablab and teff for all I know. Incidentally, the above gene-edited teff is shorter than “normal”, which could mean it might respond to more fertilizer in the same way as those Green Revolution wheats and rices once did.
- Ah yes, the “transformation” and “revolution” tropes are definitely all over the discourse on African agriculture these days. According to this article, what transformation and revolution will require are consistent planning, political backing, a fit-for-purpose lead organization and that perennial favourite, result-oriented implementation. No word here on greenery specifically, but at least it’s not ruled out.
- And to back all that up, CGIAR gets The Economist Impact to say that more funding is needed for agricultural research and innovation. Results-oriented, naturally.
- Meanwhile, in Suriname, Bangladesh and Guinea-Bissau, local people are saving their traditional seeds and agricultural practices. The revolution will eat its own (seeds).
- Phew, the Ukrainian seed collection is squared away. Now for Suriname, Bangladesh, Guinea-Bissau…
Brainfood: Traits & environment, Acacia growth, Local extinction risk, Lebanese CWR priorities, Malawi CWR payments, Bread wheat origins, Wild lettuce, Ethiopian forages, Editing forages
- Why can’t we predict traits from the environment? Because plants are not collections of independent, isolated traits. All the more reason to study, understand and protect wild plants of economic importance, as the following papers show.
- Differential climatic conditions drive growth of Acacia tortilis tree in its range edges in Africa and Asia. Case in point of the above. Makes germplasm evaluation really hard.
- Understanding local plant extinctions before it is too late: bridging evolutionary genomics with global ecology. Modelling based on the genomic offset (GO) method and the mutations–area relationship (MAR) can help better predict the risk of extinction of different populations.
- Crop wild relatives in Lebanon: mapping the distribution of Poaceae and Fabaceae priority taxa for conservation planning. Bekaa and Baalbak have the highest diversity and the SW the most gaps.
- Community-Level Incentive Mechanisms for the Conservation of Crop Wild Relatives: A Malawi Case Study. Paying communities to conserve crop wild relatives could work and be relatively cheap. Waiting to see this being applied in the Bekaa.
- Population genomics unravels the Holocene history of bread wheat and its relatives. Yeah but crop wild relatives really held back bread wheat domestication. So maybe the Bekaa owes everyone else.
- New insights gained from collections of wild Lactuca relatives in the gene bank of the Institute of Evolution, University of Haifa. Maybe they can gain an insight into how to make lettuce taste of something. And I wonder what environmental variable that will be associated with.
- Climate change and land-use change impacts on future availability of forage grass species for Ethiopian dairy systems. Two forages will do better under climate change, one worse. Assuming a lot of stuff.
- Application of CRISPR/Cas9 technology in forages. But plants are not collections of independent, isolated traits, right?