- Latest on the ICARDA genebank from the author of The Profit of the Earth.
- Honey diversity in Mexico.
- Speaking of which, did we already point to the new, improved Non-wood Forest Products Newsletter?
- The schisandra berry is apparently helping save the panda. Yeah, I never heard of it either, but more power to its elbow.
- Make your day better by looking at pictures of aquatic camels.
- Oh, here we go, cue the endless stream of stories about how genomics will save beer.
- “In the last century, 94% of the world’s seed varieties have disappeared.” No, they bloody haven’t. Only linking to this for completeness.
- Breeders get into flavour. Because celebrity chefs.
- That’s one tall maize plant. No, but really tall.
- The Great Plains are in Great Trouble: “Hundreds of species call the prairie home… A cornfield, on the other hand, is a field of corn.”
- A project dedicated to the genetic improvement of US rosaceous crops. Love that word. Rosaceous.
- Eat those millets!
- Sesame opens doors in Tanzania. See what I did there?
- WorldVeg empowers women through gardening. I know how they feel. Well, kinda.
- Want a Forbidden Apple? You know you do. #resist
- “Accustomed to seeing crops planted in straight rows featuring one or a few different varieties, Muir and his European predecessors were not prepared to recognize this subtler form of horticulture. And so they viewed California Indians as lazily gathering the fat of a landscape they had hardly touched.”
Nibbles: Investing in food, Henna botany, Buckwheat promotion, Mapping India, Optimism, Genetic diversity, Forest cocktails
- Psst, you have any examples of investments for healthy food systems? What do you mean, you don’t.
- Paint it henna.
- Pleading for pseudocereals. In Switzerland?
- Mapping India’s trees. Among other things.
- To save biodiversity, look on the bright side. Easy for you to say.
- The genetic level of biodiversity makes important contribution to ecosystem services. In birds. Right.
- Taste the forest. In cocktails.
Brainfood: Tomato chemicals, Photoperiod, Grain phenotyping, Hawaiian ag, Domestication primer, Symbionts, Turkish wheat, Yam bean diversity, Crop health, Walnut diversity, Agrobiodiversity theorising, Sea pigs, NERICA impacts, Nutrient production
- Multi-perspective evaluation of phytonutrients – Case study on tomato landraces for fresh consumption. Fancy maths proves different tomato varieties taste different.
- Adaptation to the Local Environment by Modifications of the Photoperiod Response in Crops. It’s all down to a few mutations in all crops.
- Evaluation of the SeedCounter, A Mobile Application for Grain Phenotyping. Seems like a lot of work to just be able to measure wheat seeds, but boys will have their toys.
- Indigenous Polynesian Agriculture in Hawaiʻi. Both intensive and extensive.
- How to make a domesticate. It takes a long time, and involves lots of genes.
- Symbiosis limits establishment of legumes outside their native range at a global scale. Non-symbiotic legumes have spread further than symbiotic ones into non-native areas.
- Wheat Landraces Currently Grown in Turkey: Distribution, Diversity, and Use. More than half of morphotypes (59%) lost since 1920 overall, but none in some areas.
- Ecotypic differentiation under farmers’ selection: Molecular insights into the domestication of Pachyrhizus Rich. ex DC. (Fabaceae) in the Peruvian Andes. Separate Amazonian and Andean lineages, and P. tuberosum arising from P. ahipa.
- Crop health and its global impacts on the components of food security. To better understand acute impacts, model systemic ones.
- Climate-Related Local Extinctions Are Already Widespread among Plant and Animal Species. About half of about 1000 species showed local extinction.
- Rethinking the history of common walnut (Juglans regia L.) in Europe: Its origins and human interactions. Expansion from glacial refugia, followed by human exploitation. Compare and contrast with Asia. Or read about the whole thing in AramcoWorld.
- Agrobiodiversity and a sustainable food future. Apparently all you need to do to support the “use of biological diversity in sustainable agricultural and food systems” is to recognize that there are 4 interconnected themes: (1) genetic resources, ecology and evolution; (2) governance policy, institutions and legal agreements; (3) food, nutrition, health and disease; and (4) global change drivers with social ecological interactions.
- Eastern Mediterranean Mobility in the Bronze and Early Iron Ages: Inferences from Ancient DNA of Pigs and Cattle. Anatolia to southeastern Europe and back to the Levant across the Bronze-Iron Age transition. The Sea Peoples had pigs?
- Contribution of improved rice varieties to poverty reduction and food security in sub-Saharan Africa. NERICA adoption increased annual per capita income by US$4 per year from 2000, despite yields going down a bit.
- Farming and the geography of nutrient production for human use: a transdisciplinary analysis. Need to try to maintain production diversity as farm size increases. But let Jess Fanzo explain it better.
Mapping wheat diversity in Turkey
No sooner did I blog about a paper which mapped diversity in a crop in Mexico across time, that I came across one mapping diversity in another crop in Turkey. 1
The authors — a truly international bunch from the Bahri Dagdas International Agricultural Research Institute, the Vavilov Institute, CIMMYT, ICARDA, FAO, and UC Davis — describe a huge effort to collect and describe wheat from all over the country during 2009-2014. They then compare the resulting socioeconomic and geographic patterns of diversity with a previous survey done by the Vavilov Institute in the 1920s, the results of which were published in 1935-9 by Mirza Gökgöl, a Turkish scientist who accompanied that expedition. 2
As in the Mexican maize study, diversity in the crop was measured in terms of distinct morphological types, and was unevenly distributed around the country, but unlike in that work, diversity was calculated for each administrative province, rather than in each square in a grid. As provinces vary widely in size, and in the extent to which wheat is grown in them, this approach is not ideal.
Nevertheless, it was possible to make direct comparisons between the two study periods for about 17 provinces. Discounting some very rare and very minor morphological variants, it seems fairly safe to say that for these provinces, the number of distinct wheat types went down about 59% overall, though with large differences among provinces. There is no map showing this in the paper, but, thanks to my colleague Nora Castañeda, I can help you with that. Red is down, green is up.
What explains wheat landraces still thriving in some places, and not in others?
Socioeconomic data indicated that landrace farmers are found mostly in remote mountainous subsistence communities with very little grain trade, small areas planted to wheat, and relatively simple production technologies. The key reasons famers continue to grow landraces are their grain qualities and adaptation to abiotic stresses.
Nibbles: Celebrity chef, Brazilian meeting & dessert, Citizen experiment, Phenotyping course, Fonio, Milpa, Broccoli nutrients, Biodiversity $$, Soybean history
- Alexis Soyer was apparently the first celebrity chef.
- EMBRAPA gets to grips with crop wild relatives, with a little help from their friends.
- Did they serve brigaidero, though?
- Take part in a crowd-sourced experiment on plant adaptation.
- And then go and find out how the experts do it.
- Will fonio‘s day ever come?
- Celebrating the milpa.
- Gotta eat your broccoli fresh for the full nutrient monty.
- Putting (yet another) value on biodiversity. This one by adding or subtracting a species to a grassland plot and seeing what happens to C sequestration.
- What price soybeans?