- Rapid adaptive increase of amylase gene copy number in Indigenous Andeans. Indigenous Andean populations evolved exceptionally high copy numbers of the AMY1 salivary amylase gene, likely linked to long-term adaptation to starch-rich diets associated with potato domestication roughly 10,000 years ago.
- Horse genetics, archaeology, and the beginning of riding. Horse domestication was not a sudden genetic event beginning around 2200–2100 BCE, but a long and regionally varied process in which Indigenous Eurasian pastoralists progressively managed, rode, milked and selectively bred multiple horse lineages over many centuries, transforming mobility and social organization well before the rise of the dominant modern domestic horse lineage.
- Bridging biodiversity and food systems: A nationwide synthesis of non-conventional food plants (PANCs) in Brazil. Brazil’s non-conventional food plants (PANCs) and associated Indigenous and traditional knowledge could help build more diverse, climate-resilient and socially inclusive food systems while strengthening biodiversity conservation, rural livelihoods and public food programs.
- Indigenous Wisdom for a Changing World: Bridging Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Biodiversity Conservation. Sacred groves and other community-managed landscapes in central Ethiopia conserve high levels of biodiversity through Indigenous institutions, ritual practices and traditional ecological knowledge, suggesting that effective conservation depends on treating cultural stewardship systems as integral to ecological resilience rather than as secondary to scientific management.
- When Knowledge Isn’t Free: Legal and Ethical Imperatives of Protecting Indigenous Intellectual Property. There’s a persistent mismatch between Western intellectual-property regimes and Indigenous concepts of collective ownership, biocultural heritage and intergenerational custodianship of knowledge, and that’s unfair.
- Crediting and citing Indigenous Knowledges within research. Biodiversity conservation becomes more effective when Indigenous scientists and communities participate as equal partners rather than merely as local stakeholders or informants.
Nibbles: Svalbard prize, Rice breeding, Coffee geography, Biodiversity loss monitoring, Spatial data
- The Svalbard Global Seed Vault gets the Princesa de Asturias Prize for international cooperation. Time to celebrate.
- Celebrating Pamela Ronald and scuba rice.
- Celebrating Ohsoon Yun and the geography of coffee.
- I’ll certainly celebrate if the approach of the NATURE-FIRST project can be applied to loss of agricultural biodiversity one day.
- The World Bank is in a celebratory mood with regards to geospatial and Earth observation data. I’ll join them when they fund a NATURE-FIRST for crop diversity.
Humble crop beats superfood
Two articles about the contrasting fortunes of Andean crops came out last week. They describe different sides of the same broad story: Indigenous agricultural systems are highly biodiverse and increasingly positioned as climate adaptation strategies, but they are also under pressure.
In Peru, potato farmers in places like the Parque de la Papa are actively conserving thousands of native potato varieties as a form of insurance. This is climate change adaptation: maintaining agrobiodiversity, preserving traditional knowledge, and using resilient crop varieties and farming practices to buffer against warming temperatures, erratic rainfall, and pest and disease pressure. The message is that crop diversity itself is a survival strategy, both ecological and cultural.
The recent history of quinoa in Bolivia shows the same system under a different kind of stress: global demand drove a commodity boom that incentivized monoculture expansion and mechanization, which in turn contributed to soil degradation, erosion and reduced resilience. Coming back from that is proving difficult.
Together, the two cases show that when Indigenous agroecosystems are treated as living repositories of diversity, they can enhance resilience, including to climate change; and that when they are pulled into boom-driven export specialization, that resilience can be undermined. The shared lesson, at least for me, is that climate adaptation in mountain agriculture depends on maintaining ecological and genetic diversity embedded in Indigenous land management systems.
A point that I suspect is highlighted in the book Andean Potatoes and Quinoa: Origin, Current Status and Recipes of Ancestral Crops, also recently announced.
Brainfood: Targets, Plant Treaty, Decolonization, Fonio germination, Recalcitrant seeds, Microbiome, Taro seed system
- Status and future of seed conservation of threatened plants in the post-2020 era. 21% of threatened plants are conserved in genebanks across 44 countries in Europe and western Asia. Not bad, but not good enough. I wonder how many of those 21% will be of interest to breeders?
- How the international treaty on plant genetic resources for food and agriculture can support effective germplasm exchange: four Colombian case studies. The Plant Treaty can really help a country’s genebanks and breeders drive agricultural development, given half a chance.
- Reconciliation or re-colonization? Critical perspectives on seed banking and colonialism. Indigenous communities need to be careful in collaborating with genebanks and breeders.
- Impacts of climate change on fonio millet: seed germination ecology and suitability modelling of an indigenous West African cereal. Climate change will screw up the germination of fonio in some places, so genebanks and breeders better get cracking.
- Euterpe edulis seed recalcitrance: difficult, yes, but not impossible to genebank. Tricky seed storage behaviour need not deter genebankers.
- Accelerated aging caused diversity and specificity loss in the bacterial communities of Brassica napus seedlings. Genebanks should be careful with their seed aging experiments, because they might screw up the seed microbiome.
- Understanding Biotic Constraints to Taro (Colocasia esculenta) Production in the Derived Savanna and Humid Forest Agroecosystems of Nigeria. Genebanks need seed systems though.
Brassica on the brink
How did collards get to remote oases on the edge of the Sahara? That’s what ethnobotanists Bronwen Powell and Abderrahim Ouarghidi have been looking into for like 20 years now, and it’s a fascinating story. Which you can read about in detail in their paper in Economic Botany. They also present an abbreviated form of the argument in The Conversation. Which got Nibbled some months back, though without giving anything away. But actually what I recommend you do is listen to Jeremy interview the intrepid duo in the latest episode of Eat This Podcast.