- Want to teach about agrobiodiversity? Help is at hand.
- Want to learn about agrobiodiversity? Stay here.
- Want to know what’s going on in biodiversity conservation at Cambridge? Here’s how. Tell us if agriculture gets a look-in. If it doesn’t, come back here. But I bet there’ll be something about landscapes.
- What is a landscape? “The answer … differs tremendously depending on the respondent,” it says here. Wow, those Cambridge boffins will be so shocked.
- Want to know about the plants in that landscape whose definition is so much in the hands of respondents? Most were discovered by just a few botanical superstars. But how many women?
- And if that landscape is Turkish and there are (is?) livestock in it, this is what you’ll see.
- Want to tour the world’s top evolution sites? Here’s the first stop. Now, how about crop evolution (and domestication, natch) sites. Like some livestock- and crop-wild-relative-discovered-by-a-botanical-superstar-filled Turkish landscape, perhaps.
- Or what about sites connected with food production and marketing more generally, for that matter. No, that list would be too long. Interesting, but too long. Would need to prioritize ruthlessly.
- One thing for certain, though, it should include a couple of community genebanks.
- Where it is not inconceivable that seeds would be protected following age-old practices. Which may or may not be taught in fancy courses.
- Oh, and beer.
Nibbles: Chillies, Catfish, Blight, Beef, Svalbard, Biofortification, Agriculture and health book, Ahipa, GBIF, Pacific grape and nuts, Cassava and marriage, Amazon, Lost genebanks, Vietnamese food, Yoghurt
- Another use for chillies: keeping errant apes away.
- Catfish are the new tilapia.
- New fungicide-resistant strain of potato late blight found in UK. (How do they name these things?)
- The chickenization of the US beef industry, on NPR. Salutary.
- The Seed Warrior of Svalbard gets over-exposed.
- What HarvestPlus is doing on each of its crops, in a handy brochure. And more on the same subject but a different crop from Bill Gates himself.
- But that’s just one aspect of the relationship between agriculture and nutrition/health. Right? Right.
- You also need dietary diversification, right? Right.
- What’s that you say? Biodiversity databasing need not be hellish?
- Danny waxes nostalgic about Wallis and Futuna grapes. He and I also met a few nuts in the Pacific in our time. Grape-nuts. Geddit?
- Latest Plant Cuttings includes big piece on cassava.
- And you can put that in an ecological context.
- Do you have a forgotten germplasm collection?
- Vietnam gets its first EU Geographic Indication. Can’t help thinking it need not have bothered.
- Greek yoghurt, on the other hand…
Nibbles: Landscapes, Ireland, Veitch’s, Purple tomato
- Revitalising socio-ecological production landscapes. It’s all the buzz, even though it doesn’t trip off my tongue.
- And the buzz keeps building for AgBioDiv 2012 in Ireland, 9 February.
- The great house of Veitch — but not a word about their many veg varieties.
- The first “really” purple tomato now available as seed.
Ulu in Hawaii
Great video from the Breadfruit Institute on the importance of that fruit in Hawaii.
Brainfood: Tea, NGS, Grandmothers, Anti-scorbutics, Barley population structure, Climate change below ground, Rice
- Genetic structure and diversity of India hybrid tea. It’s complicated. It’s important because the success of tea outside its core are is due to hybridization between Indian and Chinese types in Assam starting in 1875. It’s limited.
- NGS technologies for analyzing germplasm diversity in genebanks. That’s Next-Generation Sequencing. Can be used to “identify patterns of genetic diversity, map quantitative traits and mine novel alleles.” Recommendation is for “genotyping by sequencing” to be applied stepwise, starting with a core collection. That’ll be complicated, but the real bottleneck will be the phenotyping.
- The role and influence of grandmothers on child nutrition: culturally designated advisors and caregivers. Wise up, nutrition advocates. You are, apparently, ignoring egg-suckers, a primary force for good.
- The importance of eating local: slaughter and scurvy in Antarctic cuisine. Who needs oranges when you have fresh penguin at hand?
- Islands and streams: clusters and gene flow in wild barley populations from the Levant. There is ecogeographic patterning in the wild material, once you remove the effect of recent admixture with cultivated barley. Geneflow is more N to S than vice versa.
- Global change belowground: impacts of elevated CO2, nitrogen, and summer drought on soil food webs and biodiversity. It’s complex, really complex; increased CO2 and N may result in new, simpler belowground assemblages.
- Rice and Language Across Asia: Crops, Movement, and Social Change. An entire issue of Rice journal.