- Genebanks, crop wild relatives, friends, even a cool title — this one has it all: The New Potato.
- Latest on the CATIE seed collection.
- The wonder of Ethiopian food.
- Which I guess can include teff again now.
- Digitizing the Smithsonian — fast.
- George Washington Carver celebrated.
- Oh look, there’s a new version of SPAM. Let the GISsing begin.
8000 years of agricultural history in two papers
A paper just out in Quaternary Science Reviews provides an overview of the first 3000 years of the spread of cultivated cereals around Eurasia, based on archaeobotanical evidence. The paper has some nice maps, but the press release has a really cool animated gif, which I had no hesitation in stealing.
Here’s a quick summary:
- Before 5000 BCE: farming communities used foothill, alluvial and catchment locations in different parts of Eurasia.
- Between 5000-2500 BCE: crops move around, but remain ecologically constrained, with the Tibetan Plateau and the Asian monsoons separating east from west, and north from south.
- Between 2500-1500 BCE: crops are taken to new thermal and hydrologic contexts, bringing previously isolated agricultural systems together.
And where are we now? Well, for that you need another new paper, this one in PLOS ONE: Regional and global shifts in crop diversity through the Anthropocene. As luck would have it, three phases here too, covering the past 50 years:
- little change in crop diversity from 1961 through to the late 1970s
- a 10-year period of sharp diversification through the early 1980s
- “levelling-off” of crop diversification beginning in the early 1990s
No gif, alas, but there’s a little video accompanying the press release in which the author summarizes the results.
The title of that press release says it all really: “A small number of crops are dominating globally. And that’s bad news for sustainable agriculture.” Compare and contrast with the findings of Colin Khoury and friends from a couple of years back on the increasing homogeneity of global diets. Basically looking at the same data in a somewhat different way: pretty much the same result.
Agriculture in watercolour
Before the invention of the camera, people used watercolours to document the world. Over the centuries, painters – both professional and amateur – created hundreds of thousands of images recording life as they witnessed it. Every one of these paintings has a story to tell, but many are hidden away in archives, albums and store rooms, too fragile to display. The Watercolour World exists to bring them back into view.
And pretty fantastic it is too. Search for agriculture and see for yourself.
Brainfood: Sinotato, Photophenomics, Bangladesh lentils, Vernalization gene, Droning on, Pathogen identification, Human domestication, Citrus cryo, Purple rain, Teff diversity, Mining biodiversity lit, Wild dates, Buckwheat improvement, Panicum genome
- Potato and Food Security in China. Huge expansion, mainly due to product diversification, but still room for growth. But how will it end? Like bananas?
- Converging phenomics and genomics to study natural variation in plant photosynthetic efficiency. Chlorophyll fluorescence technologies are revolutionizing phenotyping. Now everyone will want another gadget.
- Is DNA fingerprinting the gold standard for estimation of adoption and impacts of improved lentil varieties? It’s not about yield.
- A florigen paralog is required for short-day vernalization in a pooid grass. Nope, I can’t say it better than the press release: Ancient gene duplication gave grasses multiple ways to wait out winter.
- Drones for Conservation in Protected Areas: Present and Future. Sure, why not. On-farm too?
- Genome-Enhanced Detection and Identification (GEDI) of plant pathogens. Sort of barcoding for bugs.
- Self-domestication in Homo sapiens: Insights from comparative genomics. There’s a domestication syndrome for humans too.
- Cryopreservation of Citrus limon (L.) Burm. F Shoot Tips Using a Droplet-vitrification Method. Well, at least two varieties work.
- Farmers Drive Genetic Diversity of Thai Purple Rice (Oryza sativa L.) Landraces. Well, who else?
- Genetic Diversity of Ethiopian Tef [(Eragrostis tef (Zucc.) Trotter] Released and Selected Farmers’ Varieties along with Two Wild Relatives as Revealed by Microsatellite Markers. The landraces are distinct from the released varieties, and more diverse.
- Biodiversity Observations Miner: A web application to unlock primary biodiversity data from published literature. Nice enough, but you need to upload a PDF corpus. Why not let it loose on the internet?
- Cross-species hybridization and the origin of North African date palms. I always knew that P. theophrasti would come in useful.
- Revisiting the versatile buckwheat: reinvigorating genetic gains through integrated breeding and genomics approach. Start with a database, core collection, and wild relatives. Gratifyingly old-fashioned.
- The genome of broomcorn millet. That would be Panicum miliaceum.
Nibbles: A2S2019, ICRISAT seeds, High protein rice, American grapes, Religion & diet, Australian NUS
- Access to Seeds comes out with 2019 edition. Not much change, alas. LATER: Ok, I stand corrected. And spanked.
- Maybe this ICRISAT online seed tool will help with that access.
- How many people will have access to this high protein rice?
- Indigenous American grape species: more than just rootstocks.
- The religion of diets.
- Bush tucker is a religion for some.