- The Center for Plant Conservation has Best Plant Conservation Practices to Support Species Survival in the Wild. With online forum goodness.
- A little bit down-market, there’s What Are Seed Banks: A Complete Guide.
- How Do We Preserve the Vanishing Foods of the Earth? Good question, and nice article, but there’s surely more to the answer than what it says.
- Like indigenous people.
- And the Plant Treaty. Here’s two provocative briefing papers on that from the African Centre for Biodiversity in the run-up to the Governing Body meeting in November.
- Oh, and breeding. Even crowd-sourced breeding.
- Let the tequila industry show you what to do, in fact.
Nibbles: Diversification, Watermelon lecture, Global productivity gaps, Kenyan CWR, Indian rice diversity, Native American seeds, Cool newsletters
- Value chains for baskets of products to diversify production and consumption.
- Video lecture on watermelon domestication.
- “…global agricultural productivity needs to increase at an average annual rate of 1.73 percent to sustainably produce food, feed, fiber, and bioenergy for 10 billion people in 2050.
- Maybe crop wild relatives can help? Kenyan media thinks so. This is the project in question, though you wouldn’t know it from the article.
- Somewhat one-sided account of ex situ rice conservation in India. People are looking into some of the claims…
- The Native American Seeds Protection Act of 2019 explained. Fingers crossed.
- Latest newsletters: the European PGRFA network & Genesys.
Brainfood: Diversification, Wheat genomics, Historical tom, Crop mapping, African crops & CC, Trans CWR, Fish nutrition, Seed storage, Indian rice, Food Neighbourhoods, Diet sustainability, Onion evaluation, Aussie wild rice, Rice evaluation
- To diversify or not to diversify, that is the question. Pursuing agricultural development for smallholder farmers in marginal areas of Ghana. Diversify.
- Improving grain yield, stress resilience and quality of bread wheat using large-scale genomics. A genotype –> phenotype map at last. I guess that means breeders are superfluous.
- The earliest recorded tomato in Britain, in Wales. In 1590, no less.
- Biotechnology of the sweetpotato: ensuring global food and nutrition security in the face of climate change. A whole special issue. Our troubles are over.
- Probabilistic global maps of crop-specific areas from 1961 to 2014. A new, different, cooler algorithm provides somewhat different results to older, less cool algorithms.
- Potential adaptive strategies for 29 sub-Saharan crops under future climate change. Climatic conditions not currently experienced by these crops will spread, but CWRs and diversity from outside Africa might help.
- Trans Situ Conservation of Crop Wild Relatives. Just means properly integrated in and ex situ.
- Criar y Dejarse Criar: Trans-Situ Crop Conservation and Indigenous Landscape Management through a Network of Global Food Neighborhoods. See what it means? Scaling up the Parque de la Papa.
- Harnessing global fisheries to tackle micronutrient deficiencies. Small fish from the tropics could be really good for nutrition in some countries. Namibia, I’m looking at you.
- Artificial seed aging reveals the invisible fraction: Implications for evolution experiments using the resurrection approach. Store your seeds properly.
- Status of Rice (Oryza sativa L.) Genepool Collected from Western Ghats Region of India: Gap Analysis and Diversity Distribution Mapping using GIS Tools. Out of 678 rice landraces from this region, 43 have been used in crop improvement.
- Advancing an Integrative Framework to Evaluate Sustainability in National Dietary Guidelines. In 32 sub-dimensions, no less. Important.
- Assembly and characterisation of a unique onion diversity set identifies resistance to Fusarium basal rot and improved seedling vigour. Group according to local daylength.
- Australian wild rice populations: a key resource for global food security. Because they’ve been isolated from the crop.
- Novel method for evaluation of anaerobic germination in rice and its application to diverse genetic collections. No word on whether it’s applicable to Aussie wild species, but I bet it is.
Nibbles: Phenotyping, Capsicum expert, Svalbard kudos, Yippee-ki-yay, Future Seeds, Bottoms up, Maps galore, Knepp Wildland Project
- Agar plates, hydroponics, or field? The best way to do your phenotyping in one handy chart.
- Pioneering chilli expert Fabián García inducted into the National Agricultural Center’s Hall of Fame.
- Svalbard Global Seed Vault makes Top 10 of Project Management Institute’s best 50 projects, between M-Pesa and Netflix.
- Saving horse breeds in the USA.
- CIAT’s new genebank is in the works.
- Beer companies try to save their water supply. No word on what they plan to do about saving barley and hops diversity.
- World Bank maps biodiversity and the threats it faces. No plants, but still interesting. Opening the buggers is not easy, though.
- Wildland farming in the UK. A glimpse of the beckoning post-Brexit future.
Nibbles: Agricultural transition, Cassava beer, Lost Feast, African seeds, Plants course, Bitters, Rangeland management, Prize
- Rubber brings rage in India.
- Cassava brings beer in Brazil.
- Book on how foods go extinct.
- The Economist discovers good seeds.
- Why Study Plants? See above.
- The biodiverse botany of bitters.
- Rangeland management in the Great Plains: a timeline.
- I know, what we need is a Food System Vision Prize.