- Progress toward the identification and stacking of crucial domestication traits in pennycress. Thank goodness it’s closely related to Arabidopsis.
- Sixty years of tracking conservation progress using the World Database on Protected Areas. Will increasingly expand to informally protected ares and link to other databases.
- Evaluating the impacts of protected areas on human well-being across the developing world. Pretty positive impacts for communities living near protected areas, with some tourism.
- Does oil palm agriculture help alleviate poverty? A multidimensional counterfactual assessment of oil palm development in Indonesia. Not in remote, mainly subsistence villages. So I guess that means the best outcomes come from oil palm plantations near protected areas?
- Perspective: What Does Stunting Really Mean? A Critical Review of the Evidence. Not as much as some think, but not nothing.
- Synchronized failure of global crop production. Lower production synchrony within crops, but higher among crops, meaning calorie production very vulnerable to climate change.
- Comparative analysis of perennial and annual Phaseolus seed nutrient concentrations. Ca, Cu, Fe, Mg, Mn, and P higher in wild annuals.
- Urine salts elucidate Early Neolithic animal management at Aşıklı Höyük, Turkey. May show the transition from hunting caprines to keeping them penned up about 10,000 years ago outside the Fertile Crescent.
- Cooked starchy food in hearths ca. 120 kya and 65 kya (MIS 5e and MIS 4) from Klasies River Cave, South Africa. Earliest evidence of parenchyma as food, apparently.
- Phenotypic variation of cassava root traits and their responses to drought. Phancy phenotyping.
- Conventional land‐use intensification reduces species richness and increases production: A global meta‐analysis. Especially in mid-intensity systems, but in low- and high-intensity systems you can get closer to win-wins.
- Projecting impacts of global climate and land‐use scenarios on plant biodiversity using compositional‐turnover modelling. All the intensification in the world is not going to help if climate change isn’t curbed.
- Whole genomes and transcriptomes reveal adaptation and domestication of pistachio. Salinity tolerance related to jasmonic acid synthesis pathway.
Brainfood: Grazing behaviour, XW, Swedish Neolithic, Apple genome impact, Mango diversity, Blueberry quality, Durum genome, Ancient sorghum, Nordic rye, Tomato flavour, Diets & health, CGIAR & ITPGRFA
- An inexpensive and open‐source method to study large terrestrial animal diet and behaviour using time‐lapse video and GPS. GoPro used to figure out what species grazing cows eat throughout the year. Could be useful to gauge forage value of different plants.
- The risk posed by Xanthomonas wilt disease of banana: Mapping of disease hotspots, fronts and vulnerable landscapes. Northern Mozambique and central lowland DR Congo are the gateways. Extension is the key.
- Maritime Hunter-Gatherers Adopt Cultivation at the Farming Extreme of Northern Europe 5000 Years Ago. Migrating farmers drew the line at Sweden.
- Apple whole genome sequences: recent advances and new prospects. Great insights into domestication and diversity of collections. Next step: genomic prediction.
- Estimation of genetic diversity and relatedness in a mango germplasm collection using SNP markers and a simplified visual analysis method. The collection at the USDA Subtropical Horticulture Research Station could be half the size.
- Haplotype-phased genome and evolution of phytonutrient pathways of tetraploid blueberry. Including candidate genes for fruit quality.
- Durum wheat genome highlights past domestication signatures and future improvement targets. Mutation for high cadmium accumulation common in domesticated material, but a variant allowing better growth in zinc-deficient soils and less accumulation available in wild populations.
- A domestication history of dynamic adaptation and genomic deterioration in Sorghum. Genomes from archaeological specimens suggest that decrease in diversity over time in sorghum was not due to an initial one-off domestication bottleneck, but rather to repeated sequential founding episodes. Doesn’t seem like much of a difference to me.
- Population genetic structure in Fennoscandian landrace rye (Secale cereale L.) spanning 350 years. Just one big happy, old family.
- Meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies provides insights into genetic control of tomato flavor. Breeders could breed for flavour. But will they?
- Health effects of dietary risks in 195 countries, 1990–2017: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2017. People should eat more of the above grains and fruits.
- CGIAR Operations under the Plant Treaty Framework. Non-monetary benefits are not to be sneezed at, but all too often are.
Free book on mapping species
The book in question is Mapping Species Distributions: Spatial Inference and Prediction by Janet Franklin, from 2010 I think. Here’s the blurb:
Maps of species’ distributions or habitat suitability are required for many aspects of environmental research, resource management and conservation planning. These include biodiversity assessment, reserve design, habitat management and restoration, species and habitat conservation plans and predicting the effects of environmental change on species and ecosystems. The proliferation of methods and uncertainty regarding their effectiveness can be daunting to researchers, resource managers and conservation planners alike. Franklin summarises the methods used in species distribution modeling (also called niche modeling) and presents a framework for spatial prediction of species distributions based on the attributes (space, time, scale) of the data and questions being asked. The framework links theoretical ecological models of species distributions to spatial data on species and environment, and statistical models used for spatial prediction. Providing practical guidelines to students, researchers and practitioners in a broad range of environmental sciences including ecology, geography, conservation biology, and natural resources management.
Have fun.
Brainfood: Pig diversity, Mutant peanut, Coffee sustainability, PVP, Agricultural conversion double, Citrus phytosanitary, Vanilla genome, Veggie evaluation, Indian TR4, Wtk1, Dietary diversity, Canola origins, Ecuadorian quinoa, Alfalfa evaluation, Underused yam
- Assessing Sus scrofa diversity among continental United States, and Pacific islands populations using molecular markers from a gene banks collection. The feral pigs of the Pacific may be a nuisance, but they represent an interesting genetic melange.
- Identification of a mutant from Arachis veigae with enhanced seed oleic and very long-chain fatty acid content. Gotta love crop wild relatives.
- Coffee Farmers’ Motivations to Comply with Sustainability Standards. Show them the money.
- The Globalisation of Plant Variety Protection: Are Developing Countries Still Policy Takers? Depends on how you look at it.
- Grass to grain: Probabilistic modeling of agricultural conversion in the North American Great Plains. It’s still happening.
- Spatial priorities for agricultural development in the Brazilian Cerrado: may economy and conservation coexist? See above.
- Phytosanitary management of Citrus germplasm in France. Better safe than sorry.
- Genomics-based diversity analysis of Vanilla species using a Vanilla planifolia draft genome and Genotyping-By-Sequencing. And just like that, there’s a new germplasm collection on the block. And it’s all genotyped.
- Sources of Resistance for Two-spotted Spider Mite (Tetranychus urticae) in Scarlet (Solanum aethiopicum L.) and Gboma (S. macrocarpon L.) Eggplant Germplasms. They have glandular trichomes.
- First detection of Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. cubense tropical race 4 (TR4) on Cavendish banana in India. Be afraid.
- Wheat tandem kinases provide insights on disease‐resistance gene flow and host–parasite co‐evolution. The allele for resistance was left behind during domestication.
- Systematic review of use and interpretation of dietary diversity indicators in nutrition-sensitive agriculture literature. Needs more standardization.
- Whole-genome resequencing reveals Brassica napus origin and genetic loci involved in its improvement. Hybrid of the ancestor of European turnip and the common ancestor of kohlrabi, cauliflower, broccoli, and Chinese kale.
- Molecular characterization of Ecuadorian quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa Willd.) diversity: implications for conservation and breeding. 3 groups, but no geographic structure.
- Resilience, Stability, and Productivity of Alfalfa Cultivars in Rainfed Regions of North America. Difficult for a cultivar to be all three.
- Dioscorea dumetorum (Kunth) Pax, a neglected and underutilized yam species in Benin: folk classification and post-harvest conservation. Needs work before it’s too late.
Brainfood: African rice domestication, Ancient aliens, Durum landraces, Horticultural landraces, Breeding double, Pollinator research, Sacred forests, Traditional Hawaiian ag, Conserving tomatoes, Mapping impacts, Rewilding, Economic growth, Aquaculture impacts, Phenotyping colours
- The complex geography of domestication of the African rice Oryza glaberrima. Domesticated in multiple places, and the formerly putative ancestor population unlikely to be so.
- Prehistoric cereal foods of southeastern Europe: An archaeobotanical exploration. Including Panicum millet as far back as the Bronze Age, interestingly.
- Genetic diversity in Ethiopian Durum Wheat (Triticum turgidum var durum) inferred from phenotypic variations. Some landraces are better than some improved varieties, sometimes, somewhere.
- Editorial: Rediscovering Local Landraces: Shaping Horticulture for the Future. See above.
- Enhancing the rate of genetic gain in public-sector plant breeding programs: lessons from the breeder’s equation. What do they have to say about the genetic diversity term, I hear you ask? “For many species, the primary value of exotic genetic variation is the identification and deployment of rare alleles with large effects that can be introduced into elite breeding programs via a thoughtful implementation of marker-assisted selection…”
- The many‐faced Janus of plant breeding. It’s more than just genetics.
- The need for coordinated transdisciplinary research infrastructures for pollinator conservation and crop pollination resilience. Mine historical data and mobilize the citizenry.
- Human disturbance impacts the integrity of sacred church forests, Ethiopia. Even the small forests are important.
- The potential of indigenous agricultural food production under climate change in Hawaiʻi. They could have fed today’s population, and could still do so.
- Managing plant genetic resources using low and ultra-low temperature storage: a case study of tomato. Nothing is perfect.
- A spatial framework for ex-ante impact assessment of agricultural technologies. I do love a map, but I have to wonder if you can have too much of a good thing.
- Why we should let rewilding be wild and biodiverse. Well, why not?
- Increasing impacts of land use on biodiversity and carbon sequestration driven by population and economic growth. The 2008 financial crisis was good for biodiversity.
- Rapid growth in greenhouse gas emissions from the adoption of industrial-scale aquaculture. Crab ponds are worse than paddy fields for greenhouse gas emissions.
- ColourQuant: a high-throughput technique to extract and quantify colour phenotypes from plant images. Remind me to tell you my story about characterizing the colours of a taro collection in Vanuatu.
- Phenotypic analysis of leaf colours from the USDA, ARS sweetpotato (Ipomoea batatas) germplasm collection. Never mind, this story is better.