- 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.
The surprisingly peripatetic Bambara groundnut
Well, I finally made it back to the office after a couple of weeks on the road in Asia. Lots to talk about, of course, but it will have to wait for a while because I have too much catching up at work, and then I’ll be back home in Nairobi for the whole of August. But I can’t resist posting one little thing. What you see here is Bambara groundnut being sold in a street market in Bogor, Indonesia, where it is know as, wait for it, “kacang Bogor”, or Bogor peanut. This is the first time I’ve seen this crop outside Africa (inluding Madagascar). What prompted me to post about it is that I just saw an intriguing tweet about the crop from NRI:
Can #bambara nut be an ingredient for wonder food plumpynut? @NRInstitute & @McKnightFdn working in #Tanzania http://t.co/HXwLfqNf
— Ben Bennett (@Bennett123123) July 19, 2012
Wikipedia is clearly wrong about Bambara groundnut’s production areas. Though it does get the reference correct, it looks like it has reproduced the wrong map. But the correct one doesn’t seem to include Indonesia:
Mind you, it doesn’t include Madagascar either, where it is definitely an important crop, and from whence we even have germplasm, as Genesys reveals. I even collected it myself there, back in the day.
Oh, for decent crop distribution maps! Anyway, anyone have any other sightings of Vigna subterranean outside Africa/Madagascar?
Nibbles: ITPGRFA consultation, Organic Wageningen, Rice good and bad, HarvestXXX, Genebank education, Ethnobiology teaching, YPARD, Wild coffee prospecting, Banana & cereal genomics, In vitro award, Coca Cola and conservation, Sam Dryden, Samara, Taro in Hawaii, Biodiversity and languages, Ancient food
- ITPGRFA launches stakeholder consultation on sustainable use. First order of business: figure out what the heck it is.
- Maybe Wageningen’s new professor of organic agriculture will know.
- IRRI finds healthy rice. Meanwhile, out on the front lines…
- HarvestPlus puts out an annual report. HarvestChoice gets to grips with lablab. Yeah I find the whole HarvestFillintheblank thing confusing too.
- Nature Education does genebanks. “Ex situ conservation appears to be effective; in situ conservation has few proponents except those who practice it out of necessity.” Whoa, easy, tiger!
- And speaking of education, here are some teaching resources in ethnobiology.
- Some of which may be useful to interesting yoofs in agriculture?
- Raiders of the Lost Coffee Bean? I would have avoided the Indiana Jones parallel, frankly.
- How banana and cereals genomics is going to get us all personal jetpacks.
- In the meantime, a banana tissue culture expert nabs ICAR Punjabrao Deshmukh Outstanding Woman Scientist Award 2011.
- What new technologies would most benefit conservation? DNA and IT, mostly, apparently, naturally.
- Coca Cola sustainable agriculture guy mentions pollinator biodiversity but not citrus biodiversity.
- Profile of the head of agriculture at the Gates Foundation.
- Kew’s Samara does mountain biodiversity, crop wild relatives and much more besides.
- Taro research in Hawaii summarized in a nice PDF.
- Biological and linguistic diversity go together like a, what, horse and carriage?
- The medieval fall of the Irish cow. And the Harappan origins of the curry. Esoteric, moi?
Mapping cropland one more time
More cartographic busy-ness from IFPRI. They’re mapping cropland, and need your help to validate the results. That’s because the available maps sometimes disagree. And I’m not even entirely sure they’ve looked at all the maps that are out there. What about IWMI‘s stuff? Or FAO‘s? Or even ESRI’s pretty, but pretty useless, recent offering? I expect most of these use the same raw data anyway. So it’s probably a good idea to try to sort it all out with a bit of crowd-sourced ground-truthing. But I do wonder whether those citizen scientists are looking at extra things, beyond just verifying whether they’re standing in cropland or forest. Like gender, for example. Other bits of IFPRI would probably find that interesting, and would even be able to tell them how to do it.