- Texas A&M builds better
mousetrapcowpea. - Huge survey of the distribution of crop pests.
- Spanish tree breeders assisting in the despoliation of the Ethiopian plateau. Totally unfair, I know, there’s plenty of reasons why improving eucalyptus production in Ethiopia is a good idea. But I just wish similar effort had gone into local trees.
- They increased the biodiversity of city gardens and nobody noticed. Wonder if it would have been the same in allotments. Meanwhile, however…
- It takes 4-5 million years for allopolyploids to become different enough for their hybrids to be sterile.
- Save the Espinal!
- More water wouldn’t help sorghum in the Sahel. Yes, you guessed it, the World Congress on Agroforestry is still going on.
Nibbles: Variety adoption data, Georgian biodiversity, Species migration, Agroforestry shindig, Perennial breeding, Pacific history, Livestock emissions, Dandelion rubber
- New database on the adoption of modern varieties. No doubt will eventually include the ones coming out of this shiny new rice regional hub in Burundi.
- Useful summary of what’s happening in agricultural biodiversity in Georgia. No mention of ITPGRFA ratification, alas. You can find previous editions of the newsletter of the CGIAR Regional Program for Sustainable Agricultural Development in Central Asia and the Caucasus here.
- CSIRO come up with map of where and how fast species will move due to climate change.
- And Google Earth now has the underlying climate data you need to do that kind of analysis.
- World Congress on Agroforestry off the ground. You can follow on Twitter, #WCA2014. Also, you can read the blog. Do you remember when this type of thing didn’t even have an RSS feed?
- Did we miss this thing of perennial grain breeding at the Land Institute when it came out a year ago?
- Nice long podcast and Q&A from the Bishop Museum on the footprint Hawaiians left on their islands before contact. Great stuff on GIS analysis of suitability of ancient landscapes for taro and sweet potato. And, coincidentally, an equally long video clip on Pacific island landscapes more generally, and how they shaped the culture (and agriculture) of the Polynesians.
- ILRI DG chides The Economist on article suggesting that the only way to decrease livestock emissions is to go industrial: “There simply is no moral equivalent between those making poor food choices and those with no food choices at all.”
- New EU project on Russian dandelion does not seem to include boffins who recently turned off the rapid polymerization gene. And will they use the right species? And do some ex situ conservation? I’m not holding my breath on that last one.
Nibbles: Water buffalo, Beans, Rhizowen, Fisheries, Frankincence, Gender and gender, US CWR, Cropland, Forests and food security
- Today’s genome of passing interest, the water buffalo, less than two years after it was promised.
- Saluting the true amateurs, on bean and tuberous diversity.
- Unconsidered benefits of capture fisheries — except for the captured fish, I suppose.
- Eleven months early, AoBblog links to a new paper on how to best to tap frankincense.
- Not to be outdone, Modern Farmer relates how maple syrup could be industrialised as a row crop. H/t Metafilter.
- An e-learning course on Gender in Agriculture.
- Which is unlikely to please Ed Carr, author of Gender and adaptation: Time to do it differently.
- US inventories its crop wild relatives.
- Demand for cropland will increase.
- Which is bad for forests, which are good for food security, but not as much as they could be.
Brainfood: Domestication syndrome, Açaí cultivation, FIGS galore, Bean FIGS, Polish wheat, Rice groups, Chickpea QTLs, Cuban ag history, Agroforestry domestication, Conservation markets
- Plant domestication versus crop evolution: a conceptual framework for cereals and grain legumes. Only traits showing clear dimorphism between wild and cultivated taxa are really part of Domestication Syndrome. If there’s a continuum, it happened afterwards.
- Reconfiguring Agrobiodiversity in the Amazon Estuary: Market Integration, the Açaí Trade and Smallholders’ Management Practices in Amapá, Brazil. Açaí driving out other crops. Sometimes those underutilized crops should stay that way? Maybe not, as at the same time, homegardens are diversifying.
- Mining germplasm banks for photosynthetic improvement — wheat, rice, potato, legumes and maize. You need maps.
- Do faba bean (Vicia faba L.) accessions from environments with contrasting seasonal moisture availabilities differ in stomatal characteristics and related traits? Yes. Those maps again.
- Can Polish wheat (Triticum polonicum L.) be an interesting gene source for breeding wheat cultivars with increased resistance to Fusarium head blight? What do you think?
- Genetic diversity and classification of Oryza sativa with emphasis on Chinese rice germplasm. Six major groups, not five. We shall see.
- Genetic dissection of drought tolerance in chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.). It could all (or mostly) be down to one genomic region.
- Historical changes in the process of agricultural development in Cuba. I suppose one could say that, in a way, it’s back to the future.
- Developing more productive African agroforestry systems and improving food and nutritional security through tree domestication. Participation, post-production, private-public partnership.
- Market-based mechanisms for biodiversity conservation: a review of existing schemes and an outline for a global mechanism. Need to have a standard unit of measurement, and a mechanism for ensuring a long-term perspective. Can agricultural biodiversity learn from this?
Joining up the dots
Four blog posts from the CGIAR today. Related, as you’ll see, but not connected. Leaving us to join up the dots. Because that’s what we do. You’re welcome, CGIAR.
- From ICRAF, to kick things off, a piece summarizing the editorial accompanying the special edition of the journal Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability. The message is that the interaction between people and trees, in forests or agroforestry, is complicated and its study requires systemic approaches.
- Funnily enough, over at CIFOR there’s an example of just such a study, looking at the relationship between forest cover and children’s nutrition. Which encountered just the sort of problem alluded to above: “We were unable to figure out from our data whether people living near forests are collecting more nutritious foods from the forest, if they are cultivating them on farms and in agro-forests, or a combination.” Awkward.
- And so we come to the Landscapes for People, Food and Nature Initiative’s post on the use of mapping to look at ecosystem services. Including presumably the sort of ecosystem services the previous two pieces looked at.
- Funny though how it doesn’t mention CIAT’s work on using GIS to look at the level of forest protection actually enjoyed by Colombian forests in that country’s protected are system.
LATER: Ok, ok, the third one is not really from the CGIAR. Read the comment for more.