Genetic erosion

May 5, 2015May 6, 2015

Dam the genetic resources, full speed ahead

Global Forest Watch now has a dam dataset, covering 50 major river basins. Here’s what it looks like:

Screen Shot 2015-05-04 at 5.18.15 PM

You can mash it up online with various forest datasets, but you can also download it as a kml. Which of course means you can mash it up with your own dataset. That’s what I’ve done here with wild rice from Cambodia. The white arrows are dams, most of them either planned or under construction, the yellow dots samples of wild Oryza according to Genesys.

dams

You’ll notice a few dams with few or no nearby specimens. Off the top of my head, those would seem to be places where collecting might be in order, before the disruption goes too far. But what do the rice experts out there think?

LATER: Seems I might be on to something…

@AgroBioDiverse @RiceResearch @BrianFLloyd And not just rice of course. Yes, I would expect a serious consequence.

— Mike Jackson OBE (@mikejackson1948) May 5, 2015

April 26, 2015

Nibbles: Heirloom apples, Cowpeas, Lettuces, Livestock, Taste, Soil, Nutrition, Meat, Malaria tea, SIRGEALC, ABS

Is “heritage” just “heirloom” for “birds and animals”? I for one don’t think so. These apples are heritage, for example.
Saving the Sea Island Red Pea. Which is a heritage cowpea, I think.
43 different types of heritage lettuce illustrated.
Eat those heirloom pigs or lose them.
Taste and nutrition go hand in hand.
Soils are part of traditional agricultural heirloom systems.
Heirloom shmeirloom, those food systems need some work if they are to deliver nutrition.
The case for meat, heirloom or otherwise. And a whole series of posts on how to best feed all those cows.
A herbal tea against malaria.
The 10th SIRGEALC is on the horizon.
A lot of people going to that will probably need these resources on implementing both the International Treaty and the Nagoya Protocol at the same time.

April 22, 2015April 24, 2015

Nibbles: Ipomoea CWR, Toe cheese, Millets revolution, World diets, Brassica diversification, Diversity & productivity, Gossypium genome, MsDonalds, NNL & NPI

Where should we collect sweet potato wild relatives?
Cheese made from toe bacteria. Because we can.
The sainted M.S. Swaminathan on millets.
FAO brings together dietary guidelines from around the world.
An infographic on kale origins.
Diversity down, productivity down. At least in Alaska.
Cotton’s got a genome.
McDonalds commits to ending deforestation in its supply chain.
IUCN report says commercial agriculture and forestry could could actually be good for biodiversity. Hope McDonalds read it.

April 6, 2015April 6, 2015

Brainfood: Resilience and diversity, Cold tolerant rice, Old baobabs, VIR, Local adaptation, Prunus phylogeny, Bactris mating, Land use change, Wheat landraces, Amazonian agrobiodiversity

Does Plant Species Richness Guarantee the Resilience of Local Medical Systems? A Perspective from Utilitarian Redundancy. It depends on how knowledge is distributed.
COLD1 Confers Chilling Tolerance in Rice. From a wild relative.
Searching for the Oldest Baobab of Madagascar: Radiocarbon Investigation of Large Adansonia rubrostipa Trees. 1,600 years seems to be the record.
Genetic resources of cultivated plants as the basis for Russia’s food and environmental security. VIR needs Roubles 425 million a year ($14.3 million).
Using archaeogenomic and computational approaches to unravel the history of local adaptation in crops. Models say that adaptation to higher latitudes was rapid, simple (few genes) and unstable.
Combining conservative and variable markers to infer the evolutionary history of Prunus subgen. Amygdalus s.l. under domestication. Almonds and peaches were domesticated on either side of the Central Asian Massif from different sections of the genus that had been there for 5 million years.
Conservation implications of the mating system of the Pampa Hermosa landrace of peach palm analyzed with microsatellite markers. Bactris effective population size in genebanks is too small.
Global effects of land use on local terrestrial biodiversity. Within-sample total terrestrial species diversity down by 13.6% globally. About the same for crop wild relatives?
Exploiting genetic diversity from landraces in wheat breeding for adaptation to climate change. It would be a good idea.
Household Agrobiodiversity Management on Amazonian Dark Earths, Oxisols, and Floodplain Soils on the Lower Madeira River, Brazil. Age of household head, size of household and area of land under cultivation predict amount of agricultural biodiversity managed.

March 5, 2015March 5, 2015

Nibbles: Citrus disease, Forests & women, Green Revolution trifecta, Lost apples, PNG & ITPGRFA, Leafy greens, Cassava development, Maize evolution vid

Getting to grips with citrus greening.
The fabulous church forests of Ethiopia. But are women involved?
Three articles on why the African Green Revolution won’t be like the Asian one.
Whatever happened to the Esopus Spitzenburg?
Papua New Guinea ratifies the ITPGRFA.
African indigenous vegetables for development. Hey, I’m doing my part.
Cassava is naturally climate-smart, but yields still not rising fast enough.
Great video on the origin of maize.