- 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.
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.
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.
Nibbles: Genebank data, Edible smut, Edible bugs, Healthful bluberries, Mining Indian food, Funny spuds pix, Old grape pits, Old einkorn stash, Phylogeny & conservation double, Rhizobacteria, Rapid phenotyping, Plata periurban ag, BRICs in Africa, Chinese terraces, SMTA
- GRIN-Global comes to Portugal. That makes two.
- Eating fungi.
- Eating bugs.
- Eating Indian.
- Eating blueberries is good for you.
- Would you eat these funny-looking potatoes?
- Veg ink.
- Old grape seed in Israel.
- Old einkorn seed in England.
- Atlas of Living Australia to include phylogenetic data. Kew thinking along same lines too.
- Grasses can absorb organic N. With some help.
- “Today’s international scientific community is dominated by big mercenaries who change their teams’ research subjects to get on the cover of Nature.” But INRA isn’t like that, apparently, at least with regards to high-throughput phenotyping.
- Argentinian periurban farmers grow varieties they like to eat. Well, it’s good to have the data.
- Rounding up China and Brazil in African agriculture.
- Meanwhile, back home, famous rice terraces are being used to grow maize.
- SMTA 101.
Brainfood: Grape genetics & conservation, Ecosystem restoration & services, Collecting cycads, Pigeonpea genomics, Wild pigeonpea gaps, Breadfruit collection diversity, Banana collection diversity, Conserving mammals, Bhutanese cereal diversity, Potato nutrition
- The preservation of genetic resources of the vine requires cohabitation between institutional clonal selection, mass selection and private clonal selection. Intra-varietal diversity, that is. They apparently do it best in Portugal.
- Association of dwarfism and floral induction with a grape ‘green revolution’ mutation. Cool things I learned from this paper: 1. Pinot Meunier is a periclinal mutant. 2. Tendrils are inflorescences. 3. Dwarf grapes are dwarf for the same reason dwarf wheat is dwarf. No word on what the Portuguese are doing about it. And the fact that the paper is over 10 years old is irrelevant to its coolness.
- Quantifying the impacts of ecological restoration on biodiversity and ecosystem services in agroecosystems: A global meta-analysis. Supporting ecosystem services go up 40% on average, regulating ES by 120%. Well worth having.
- Can a Botanic Garden Cycad Collection Capture the Genetic Diversity in a Wild Population? Yes, but need to “(1) use the species biology to inform the collecting strategy; (2) manage each population separately; (3) collect and maintain multiple accessions; and (4) collect over multiple years.” Maybe they should talk to the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden guys.
- Genebanking Seeds from Natural Populations. It’s more difficult than with crops. And then you’ve got the above.
- Genomics-assisted breeding for boosting crop improvement in pigeonpea (Cajanus cajan). “…pigeonpea has become a genomic resources-rich crop and efforts have already been initiated to integrate these resources in pigeonpea breeding.” And now we wait.
- Crop wild relatives of pigeonpea [Cajanus cajan (L.) Millsp.]: Distributions, ex situ conservation status, and potential genetic resources for abiotic stress tolerance. 15 of them need collecting. And, presumably, genotyping (see above).
- Diversity in the breadfruit complex (Artocarpus, Moraceae): genetic characterization of critical germplasm. 349 individuals from 255 accessions are 197 unique genotypes from 129 lineages.
- Musa spp. Germplasm Management: Microsatellite Fingerprinting of USDA–ARS National Plant Germplasm System Collection. Used to identify mislabelled in vitro accessions. Data in GRIN-Global.
- Education and access to fish but not economic development predict chimpanzee and mammal occurrence in West Africa. Having fish to eat means you leave chimpanzees alone.
- Community Perspectives on the On-Farm Diversity of Six Major Cereals and Climate Change in Bhutan. About 30% of varieties lost over last 20 years. But what does it mean that “93% of the respondents manage and use agro-biodiversity for household food security and livelihood”? What exactly does that other 7% of farmers do?
- Amino acid composition and nutritional value of four cultivated South American potato species. S. goniocalyx is best for you. But does it taste any good?