- Wanna help rogue cartographers map food?
- GBIF sorts out biodiversity informatics in 20 steps.
- CIAT compares cassava to Jesus.
- Long-term ICRAF study says legume tree intercrop stabilizes maize yields.
- “Every seed has a story to tell.”
Nibbles: 300, Linux seeds, Reef protection, Cold turkeys, Forest atlas, Perennials, Potato King, Apple art
- If you liked our piece of a couple years back on a remarkable Indian mango tree, you’ll love Bhuwon’s latest, fuller write-up.
- Open-source seeds? Isn’t that what the ITPGRFA was supposed to be ensuring?
- How fisherfolk in Indonesia protect the reef.
- Going wild turkey.
- Mapping Cameroon’s forests. Interactively, of course.
- A perennial roundup.
- Old Fritz and the potato. Maybe genebanks should take a leaf (or tuber) out of his book?
- “What constituted beauty, she wondered, in the scientist’s eye?”
Brainfood: Host-pathogen genomics, Maize-teosinte system, Organic Europe meta-analysis, Food perceptions, Guanaco, Earthworms, Pea & powdery mildew, Pea drought tolerance, Butternut regeneration, Wild tomato salt tolerance, Germination & climate change, Medieval melons, Barley domestication, Rice origin, Livestock & wildlife, Niche modelling, Insects
- A Population Genomics Perspective on the Emergence and Adaptation of New Plant Pathogens in Agro-Ecosystems. Crop diversity affects fungal diversity as much as the other way around. Actually more so, as fungal genomes are incredibly plastic.
- Teosinte as a model system for population and ecological genomics. Genetics of speciation, hybridization, various evolutionary questions: all can usefully be looked at in the maize-teosinte system with cheap next-generation sequencing. Oh, and that can help us with crop improvement.
- Does organic farming reduce environmental impacts? –- A meta-analysis of European research. Per unit area, yes. Per unit product, not always. Need to mix and match. Good luck with that.
- “Healthy,” “diet,” or “hedonic”. How nutrition claims affect food-related perceptions and intake? If you tell people something is healthier, they believe it is, in fact, well, healthier.
- Guanaco management by pastoralists in the Southern Andes. They can coexist with cattle.
- Earthworms promote the reduction of Fusarium biomass and deoxynivalenol content in wheat straw under field conditions. Earthworms protect crops from pathogens.
- Screening of pea germplasm for resistance to powdery mildew. 14 accessions from 10 countries are promising. That’s out of 700. Hard row to hoe.
- Sources of high tolerance to salinity in pea (Pisum sativum L.). Out of some 780 accessions, China seems to be a hotspot, but the most tolerant accession was from Greece. Any overlap with the previous results?
- A rare case of natural regeneration in butternut, a threatened forest tree, is parent and space limited. In situ is not enough. Not if you don’t help it along, anyway.
- Relationship between survival and yield related traits in Solanum pimpinellifolium under salt stress. 2 accessions among a subset of over 90 from over 300 in the AVRDC collection show high survival and yield under stress. Would be interesting to know if the 90 were indeed well-chosen in the first place.
- Climate warming could shift the timing of seed germination in alpine plants. Spring emergence will shift to autumn, but the bad effect will be on the seedlings.
- Medieval emergence of sweet melons, Cucumis melo (Cucurbitaceae). Lexicography suggests that there were sweet melons in Central Asia early on, but they didn’t get to Iberia until the late 11th Century, and to the rest of Europe until the 15th. Climate and the clash of civilizations to blame, as ever.
- Tibet is one of the centers of domestication of cultivated barley. The other being the Fertile Crescent. Some Chinese hulless and six-rowed barleys in particular are similar to Tibetan wild material. But are the authors stretching the data?
- A map of rice genome variation reveals the origin of cultivated rice. Or origins. Japonica first domesticated from O. rufipogon in the middle Pearl River in Southern China, and indica is a hybrid of the first cultivars with local wild rice in South East and South Asia. But have we not heard this before? Ah, but this paper has more, better markers, no doubt. Anyway, compare and contrast with maize and barley above.
- Lessons on the relationship between livestock husbandry and biodiversity from the Kenya Long-term Exclosure Experiment (KLEE). Livestock and wildlife can coexist, but you have to work at it. Bit like the guanaco thing, then?
- Modeling plant species distributions under future climates: how fine-scale do climate projections need to be? Doesn’t matter for total extent, but actual locations of stable climates vary with scale. On average, “270 m is fine enough,” but it really depends on the species. Probably safest answer is “as fine as possible.”
- Fertilisers and insect herbivores: a meta-analysis. Fertilizers good for insect numbers. Which means bad for plants? But insect diversity? Wonder what they do to those earthworms and fungi above…
Brainfood: South American threat map, Bee domestication, Rice origins, Legume diversity, Lima bean domestication
- Analysis of threats to South American flora and its implications for conservation. Bottom line: Ecuadorian and Colombian Andes, southern Paraguay, the Guyana shield, southern Brazil, and Bolivia. But don’t let that divert your attention from the cool maps.
- Management increases genetic diversity of honey bees via admixture. No genetic bottleneck there. And the same in more words, but not as many as the original paper.
- Phylogeography of Asian wild rice, Oryza rufipogon: a genome-wide view. When in doubt, throw more markers at it. Two groups in O. rufipogon, only the Chinese/Indochinese one related to cultivated rice (indica). Japonica out on a limb. And the longer version.
- Legume Diversity Patterns in West Central Africa: Influence of Species Biology on Distribution Models. Temperature variables are most important.
- Multiple domestications of the Mesoamerican gene pool of lima bean (Phaseolus lunatus L.): evidence from chloroplast DNA sequences. Andean and Mesoamerican cultivated genepools confirmed, and two sub-genepools within the latter, one originating in western central Mexico and the other between Guatemala and Costa Rica. Will they mash up with the study in the first link? Some of the people involved are neighbours and friends.
Nibbles: Bananas, Banana genome, Moringa, Hunger games, Deforestation, Digital herbarium, NTFP in Tanzania, CC in Tanzania, CC in Nepal, CC and Ceanothus, Potatoes, Fellowships, Fermentation
- No bananas without soil nutrients.
- Perhaps the back story to the banana genome can fix that.
- Coupla big Moringa meets coming up in November.
- Britain goes for gold in the jumping-on-the-Olympic-bandwagon-to-solve-global-hunger event.
- And CEO of Cargill offers coaching: be flexible, try harder.
- Deforestation in Guatemala and Belize. I love it when I can see geopolitics from space.
- Help Kew digitise its diversity.
- FarmAfrica celebrates non-timber forest products in Tanzania.
- Which could be of interest to Tanzanian farmers who have experienced the future of climate change.
- Nepali farmers say they’ve been hit hard by climate change.
- But it is not the reason for the climb of the desert ceanothus.
- Americans about to embrace colourful potatoes. Aren’t they always?
- The 2013 Vavilov-Frankel Fellowships are now open. Apply here.
- Seth Roberts says “I want to take this! Harvard class on fermented food.” Me too.