- “…nor could they survive during inclement phases of a seasonal climate with a cheery hardiness the way our traditional varieties could.
- “How does the centrality of rice production mediate social reality among the Jola?”
- “When we say, ‘As American as apple pie,’ we think of baseball and hot dogs without ever considering not one ingredient in apple pie originates from what we call the United States.”
- “The absolute minimum we should do is preserve tissues from these animals in such a way they can be thawed and grown again.”
- “We’re botanists; we’re plant experts. Plus we had this humongous network of students, citizen scientists who were eager to do so much research that scientists at Kennedy simply didn’t have time to do.”
- “It is essential that all countries join and ratify the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Nagoya Protocol.”
Brainfood: Maize domestication, Eastern European grazing, Silk Road, Hybridization, European agroforestry, Japanese pears
- Recent demography drives changes in linked selection across the maize genome. Only a small part of teosinte contributed to maize.
- Changing year-round habitat use of extensively grazing cattle, sheep and pigs in East-Central Europe between 1940 and 2014: Consequences for conservation and policy. Animals don’t graze as much, or the same habitats, as they used to, which may not be altogether good for conservation of either plants or livestock because grazing was an important management intervention for thousands of years.
- Between China and South Asia: A Middle Asian corridor of crop dispersal and agricultural innovation in the Bronze Age. Wheat goes east, millets go west.
- Hybridization and extinction. Genetic swamping can happen, but hybridization can rescue a species too.
- Do European agroforestry systems enhance biodiversity and ecosystem services? A meta-analysis. Yes.
- Estimation of loss of genetic diversity in modern Japanese cultivars by comparison of diverse genetic resources in Asian pear (Pyrus spp.). The modern cultivars are variations on “Nijisseiki.”
Brainfood: Agricultural heritage, Unique maize, B4N, Flax core evaluation, Oca conservation, Ag expansion, Rose wild relative, Quinoa evaluation, Nepal seed systems, Amazonian domestication, Analysing germplasm data
- Agricultural Heritage Systems: A Bridge between Urban and Rural Development. “…agricultural heritage systems can take full advantage of abundant funds…” Really?
- Multi cob-bearing popcorn (Puakzo) maize: a unique landrace of Mizoram, North East, India. Would be nice to know how unique globally.
- Enabled or disabled: Is the environment right for using biodiversity to improve nutrition? Maybe, in some places.
- Orbitide Composition of Flax Core Collection (FCC). In other news, Canada has a flax core collection.
- Farmer Perspectives on OCA (Oxalis tuberosa; Oxalidaceae) Diversity Conservation: Values and Threats. It’s the cultural value, stupid. And weevils.
- The expansion of modern agriculture and global biodiversity decline: an integrated assessment. Fancy maths shows that if you assume that unabated agricultural expansion is bad in a particular way, you can come up with a model which spares land at a modest cost to per capita consumption, given decent investment in research.
- Nuclear genetic variation of Rosa odorata var. gigantea (Rosaceae): population structure and conservation implications. Wild relative of domesticated rose shows lots of diversity and two distinct populations either side of a fault zone in China.
- Worldwide Evaluation of Quinoa: Preliminary Results from Post International Year of Quinoa FAO Projects in 9 Countries. 19 sites, 21 genotypes, a few winners. But the real story is how difficult it was to get hold of the material in the first place.
- Shaping Seed Regulation in Nepal: The Role of Networks, Community and Informality. The formal needs to recognize the informal. And vice versa.
- Crop domestication in the upper Madeira River basin. Nice, brief review of evidence of domestication for a number of crops along one branch of the Amazon.
- Analysing genebank collections using “R”: Making trait information widely available to users. NordGen takes genebank data analysis to the masses. And about time too.
Brainfood: Yam protection, Gleditsia distribution, Seed systems, Conservation narratives, Roselle diversity, Hassawi extinction, Apple GWAS, Dog domestication
- Disease risk perception and diversity of management strategies by farmers: The case of anthracnose caused by Colletotrichum gloeosporioides on water yams (Dioscorea alata) in Guadeloupe. Farmers gauge the disease pretty much the way scientists do, and use a diversity of mitigation measures, including diversity.
- Ghosts of Cultivation Past – Native American Dispersal Legacy Persists in Tree Distribution. “In the southern Appalachian region, honey locust distributions are more a reflection of Native American cultural practices.”
- Good year, bad year: changing strategies, changing networks? A two-year study on seed acquisition in northern Cameroon. In bad years, women call on extended networks.
- Conservation narratives in Peru: envisioning biodiversity in sustainable development. In terms of the relationship between conservation and development, there are biodiversity protectionists, traditionalists, localists, pragmatists, and capitalists.
- Diversity analysis based on agro-morphological traits and microsatellite based markers in global germplasm collections of roselle (Hibiscus sabdariffa L.). Nicely complementary datasets show that fibre type more diverse than calyx type.
- Extinction probabilities of Hassawi cattle from Saudi Arabia using Population Viability Analysis. Fancy maths gives it 20 years.
- Genome to Phenome Mapping in Apple Using Historical Data. Going back to old phenotype data in GRIN allowed identification of SNPs for color, fruit firmness, and harvest time.
- Genomic and archaeological evidence suggest a dual origin of domestic dogs. Independent domestications from different wolf populations in East Asia and in Western Europe, with the latter partially displacing the former.
CWR front and centre
To coincide with the State of the World’s Plants Symposium, which starts today, Kew have just dropped a monumental report of the same name, complete with fancy website. Nice to see crop wild relatives get a decent amount of space (p. 21) in the section on useful plants. Oh, and the report and symposium come along with some good funding news for Kew.
Speaking of funding for crop wild relatives:
The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and Toyota Motor Corporation (Toyota) today announced a five-year partnership to provide funding to broaden the scope of The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. This will significantly increase knowledge on the extinction risk of more than 28,000 species, including many that are key food sources for a significant portion of the global population.
…
IUCN experts have chosen to focus much of the newly funded research on the populations of plants and fish that billions of people depend on as a vital source of food. These will include species of wild rice and wheat that are crucial to food security because they are the source of genetic material used to increase the yield, fertility and resistance to disease of staple crops produced by farmers across the world.
Don’t see any of this happening even a few years back. Do you?
Prof Kathy Willis @kewgardens @KewScience putting #plants on the map #SOTWP pic.twitter.com/g45pTxZPfk
— David Cope (@DrDrCope) May 11, 2016