- Svalbard on the BBC.
- Fish biorepository in Penang.
- Kitchen gardens in Kenya.
- Mothers transmitting seeds and knowledge to their daughters.
- Challenges faced by female farmers in preserving seeds after harvest: leave your suggestions. Maybe they could talk to the above?
- Trying to save citrus.
- Paul Smith of BGCI wins the Fairchild Medal. Congrats!!!
- The Washington Post has its finger on the pulses.
- “…a peaceful, multi-lingual, multi-ethnic economic system stretching from New Mexico to California that persisted for 600 years…”
- Country Nutrition Profiles: the infographics.
- The most beautiful cattle in the world.
- Extreme weather has been bad for cereals. Well I never.
- Threats to Europe’s soil biodiversity.
Nibbles: Tree conservation, Seed fairs, Baobab powder, Simran’s book, Cheesy prince, Companies & CC, Organic breeding
- Crowdfunding the Zero Tree Extinctions project.
- Seed fairs for climate change adaptation in Zimbabwe.
- Make mine a baobab smoothie.
- Another great review of Simran Sethi’s new book Bread, Wine, Chocolate: The Slow Loss of Foods We Love.
- Blessed are the cheesemakers.
- Big Food taking fright?
- Breeding the organic breeders of the future.
Brainfood: Honeybee miscegenation, Cowpea shoots & leaves, Iberian goats, CIP fingerprinting, Seed networks, Early rice, Date palm genome, Pollinator services, Bananapocalypse
- Population structure of honey bees in the Carpathian Basin (Hungary) confirms introgression from surrounding subspecies. The Hungarian honeybee is holding its own. For now.
- Genetic Variability and Heritability Estimates of Nutritional Composition in the Leaves of Selected Cowpea Genotypes [Vigna unguiculata (L.) Walp.]. Something else you can breed for.
- The Southwestern fringe of Europe as an important reservoir of caprine biodiversity. Local goat breeds in Spain and Portugal have few numbers, but much diversity, though in general weakly structured.
- Are you getting what you ordered from your genebank? Fingerprinting of the clonal potato and sweetpotato collections at the International Potato Center. Ahem. Maybe not.
- Seed exchange networks and food system resilience in the United States. Let my seeds go!
- Barnyard grasses were processed with rice around 10000 years ago. Rice had to fight it out with other wetland grasses to get domesticated.
- Whole genome re-sequencing of date palms yields insights into diversification of a fruit tree crop. Independent history in North Africa and the Middle East, but unclear if because of separate domestications or migration westward and introgression with local wild populations. Fruit colour genes the same as in oil palm.
- Pollinator conservation — The difference between managing for pollination services and preserving pollinator diversity. The point is that there’s a difference.
- Worse Comes to Worst: Bananas and Panama Disease—When Plant and Pathogen Clones Meet. TR4 is a single clone.
Brainfood: Wild barley diversity double, Sesame diversity, Coconut genome size, Giant anteater, Sucking mangoes, Teff development, PhilRice, Korean soybeans, Coffee forest management, Switchgrass diversity, Yam diversity
- Analysis of Correlations Between Climate and Molecular Adaptive Evolution of Wild Barley with Geographical Information Systems (GIS). Some genes are associated with climatic variables in wild barley, others not so much.
- Molecular Genotyping of Historical Barley Landraces Reveals Novel Candidate Regions for Local Adaption. Latitudinal structuring in northern European barley landraces down to 7 SNPs. Not clear if related to above.
- Morphological and genetic diversity assessment of sesame (Sesamum indicum L.) accessions differing in origin. Not much geographic structure.
- Ploidy and domestication are associated with genome size variation in Palms. Tall coconuts show more variation in genome size than dwarfs.
- Protected areas effectiveness in maintaining viable giant anteater (Myrmecophaga tridactyla) populations in an agricultural frontier. I just wanted to link to a paper on the giant anteater.
- Genetic Diversity in Seedling Populations of Mango. What exactly are “sucking purposes”?
- Diversifying crops for food and nutrition security — a case of teff. Hipsters will save orphan crops.
- Conservation of Rice Genetic Resources for Food Security. In the Philippines genebank, that is.
- Soybean [Glycine max (L.) Merrill]: Importance as A Crop and Pedigree Reconstruction of Korean Varieties. 168 of 178 varieties released in the last 100 years in Korea can be traced to 4 pedigrees.
- In-situ Conservation of wild forest coffee — Exploring the potential of participatory forest management in south west Ethiopia. It’s the communities, stupid.
- Switchgrass Germplasm Resources. Upland and lowland ecotypes, different ploidy levels, latitudinal differentiation, and a national collection at USDA to play with.
- Participatory evaluation of Guinea yam (Dioscorea cayenensis Lam.–D. rotundata Poir. complex) landraces from Benin and agro-morphological characterization of cultivars tolerant to drought, high soil moisture and chips storage insects. 5-15% of over 400 varieties (including duplications) are good for one thing or another.
Brainfood: Forage diversity, Chinese cherry, Meta-diversity, Sunflower ecogeography, Lima bean domestication, Dog breeding, Goat ethnogenetics, Pigs vs chickens
- Complementary effects of species and genetic diversity on productivity and stability of sown grasslands. Species diversity good for total production, genetic diversity good for regular production throughout the year, regardless of water. And more, and more.
- Genetic Diversity and Population Structure Patterns in Chinese Cherry (Prunus pseudocerasus Lindl) Landraces. Perhaps 2 domestication sites.
- Inter-individual variation promotes ecological success of populations and species: evidence from experimental and comparative studies. More diverse populations are less vulnerable to environmental changes, more stable in population size, less extinction prone, have better establishment success and larger ranges, especially under stress.
- Ecogeography and utility to plant breeding of the crop wild relatives of sunflower (Helianthus annuus L.). Many close relatives of the crop in extreme environments.
- Domestication of small-seeded lima bean (Phaseolus lunatus L.) landraces in Mesoamerica: evidence from microsatellite markers. Two domestications events. Maybe.
- Trends in genetic diversity for all Kennel Club registered pedigree dog breeds. Popular sires have made for a lot of inbreeding, but this has been getting better of late.
- The N’Dama dilemma: ethnogenetics and small ruminant breed dynamics in the tsetse zone, The Gambia. Saving the name is not enough.
- The Pig and the Chicken in the Middle East: Modeling Human Subsistence Behavior in the Archaeological Record Using Historical and Animal Husbandry Data. Chickens replaced pigs in the first millennium Middle East because they were smaller and more efficient. Oh, and eggs.