In situ

Nibbles: Diets, Millet seedbank, Healthy rice, Kazakh genebank, Decentralized seeds, Planet Local, White sage, White olive, Talangana collecting, Nature-based, Italian food, Citron, Indian quinoa, Crop expansion

And…we’re back!
Nice new infographics derived from that classic paper “Increasing homogeneity in global food supplies and the implications for food security.”
Video on a millet community seedbank in India.
I hope all these healthy Indian rices are in seedbanks somewhere, community or otherwise.
Kazakhstan is getting a new genebank, and I don’t mean a community one.
yeah but genebanks are not enough: enter INCREASE.
Wait, there’s a World Localization Day?
Looks like white sage might need less localization and more seedbanks.
I see your Mexican white sage and raise you the Calabrian white olive.
The Telangana equivalent of white sage is probably safe, though, if this collecting programme is anything to go by.
IFAD pushes nature-based farmers. White sage unavailable for comment.
The localization narrative meets Italian food. And yes, spoiler alert, Italian food does exist. Despite the increasing homogeneity in global food supplies. And it doesn’t need white olives either.
Let the hand-wringing about the Italian-ness (Italianity?) of citrons commence. But not until I’ve left the room.
Ah, but is there such a thing as Indian food? I mean, if there’s quinoa in it. I look forward to the eventual quinoa community seedbanks.
All those crops are not being locally grown for food anyway.
Have a happy new globalizing, localizing year, everyone.

Symbiotic fungus can help plants and detoxify methylmercury.
Very attractive book on the wild tomatoes of Peru. I wonder if any of them eat heavy metals.
There’s a new dataset on the world’s terrestrial ecosystems. I’d like to know which one has the most crop wild relative species per unit area. Has anyone done that calculation? They must have.
Iran sets up a saffron genebank. Could have sworn they already had one.
The Natural History Museum digs up some old wheat samples, the BBC goes a bit crazy with it.
Paleolithic diets included plants. Maybe not wheat or saffron though.
Community seedbanks are all the rage in Odisha.
Seeds bring UK and South Africa closer together. Seeds in seedbanks. Not community seedbanks, perhaps, but one can hope.
Can any of the above make agriculture any more nutrition-sensitive? I’d like to think yes. Maybe except for the mercury-eating fungus, though you never know…

Genetic diversity loss in the Anthropocene. Don’t get excited, I don’t think the method translates to cultivated species, but fancy maths says we’ve lost on average 10% of the genetic diversity within species.
A graphical causal model for resolving species identity effects and biodiversity–ecosystem function correlations. Yeah, but don’t forget that species level diversity is important too. Or rather, diversity of functional traits among species.
Cereal species mixtures: an ancient practice with potential for climate resilience. A review. Species level diversity in the same farmer’s field is being forgotten, and that’s bad.
Microbiomes in agroecosystem: Diversity, function and assembly mechanisms. Even soil microbial diversity is important…
Association analyses of host genetics, root-colonizing microbes, and plant phenotypes under different nitrogen conditions in maize. …but the effects of soil microbial diversity can get quite complicated, and interact with the genetic diversity of crop plants. Which we may or may not have lost an average 10% of.
Direct and indirect effects of management and landscape on biological pest control and crop pest infestation in apple orchards. Yeah, but species diversity can be bad too.