- If you liked our piece of a couple years back on a remarkable Indian mango tree, you’ll love Bhuwon’s latest, fuller write-up.
- Open-source seeds? Isn’t that what the ITPGRFA was supposed to be ensuring?
- How fisherfolk in Indonesia protect the reef.
- Going wild turkey.
- Mapping Cameroon’s forests. Interactively, of course.
- A perennial roundup.
- Old Fritz and the potato. Maybe genebanks should take a leaf (or tuber) out of his book?
- “What constituted beauty, she wondered, in the scientist’s eye?”
Brainfood: Host-pathogen genomics, Maize-teosinte system, Organic Europe meta-analysis, Food perceptions, Guanaco, Earthworms, Pea & powdery mildew, Pea drought tolerance, Butternut regeneration, Wild tomato salt tolerance, Germination & climate change, Medieval melons, Barley domestication, Rice origin, Livestock & wildlife, Niche modelling, Insects
- A Population Genomics Perspective on the Emergence and Adaptation of New Plant Pathogens in Agro-Ecosystems. Crop diversity affects fungal diversity as much as the other way around. Actually more so, as fungal genomes are incredibly plastic.
- Teosinte as a model system for population and ecological genomics. Genetics of speciation, hybridization, various evolutionary questions: all can usefully be looked at in the maize-teosinte system with cheap next-generation sequencing. Oh, and that can help us with crop improvement.
- Does organic farming reduce environmental impacts? –- A meta-analysis of European research. Per unit area, yes. Per unit product, not always. Need to mix and match. Good luck with that.
- “Healthy,” “diet,” or “hedonic”. How nutrition claims affect food-related perceptions and intake? If you tell people something is healthier, they believe it is, in fact, well, healthier.
- Guanaco management by pastoralists in the Southern Andes. They can coexist with cattle.
- Earthworms promote the reduction of Fusarium biomass and deoxynivalenol content in wheat straw under field conditions. Earthworms protect crops from pathogens.
- Screening of pea germplasm for resistance to powdery mildew. 14 accessions from 10 countries are promising. That’s out of 700. Hard row to hoe.
- Sources of high tolerance to salinity in pea (Pisum sativum L.). Out of some 780 accessions, China seems to be a hotspot, but the most tolerant accession was from Greece. Any overlap with the previous results?
- A rare case of natural regeneration in butternut, a threatened forest tree, is parent and space limited. In situ is not enough. Not if you don’t help it along, anyway.
- Relationship between survival and yield related traits in Solanum pimpinellifolium under salt stress. 2 accessions among a subset of over 90 from over 300 in the AVRDC collection show high survival and yield under stress. Would be interesting to know if the 90 were indeed well-chosen in the first place.
- Climate warming could shift the timing of seed germination in alpine plants. Spring emergence will shift to autumn, but the bad effect will be on the seedlings.
- Medieval emergence of sweet melons, Cucumis melo (Cucurbitaceae). Lexicography suggests that there were sweet melons in Central Asia early on, but they didn’t get to Iberia until the late 11th Century, and to the rest of Europe until the 15th. Climate and the clash of civilizations to blame, as ever.
- Tibet is one of the centers of domestication of cultivated barley. The other being the Fertile Crescent. Some Chinese hulless and six-rowed barleys in particular are similar to Tibetan wild material. But are the authors stretching the data?
- A map of rice genome variation reveals the origin of cultivated rice. Or origins. Japonica first domesticated from O. rufipogon in the middle Pearl River in Southern China, and indica is a hybrid of the first cultivars with local wild rice in South East and South Asia. But have we not heard this before? Ah, but this paper has more, better markers, no doubt. Anyway, compare and contrast with maize and barley above.
- Lessons on the relationship between livestock husbandry and biodiversity from the Kenya Long-term Exclosure Experiment (KLEE). Livestock and wildlife can coexist, but you have to work at it. Bit like the guanaco thing, then?
- Modeling plant species distributions under future climates: how fine-scale do climate projections need to be? Doesn’t matter for total extent, but actual locations of stable climates vary with scale. On average, “270 m is fine enough,” but it really depends on the species. Probably safest answer is “as fine as possible.”
- Fertilisers and insect herbivores: a meta-analysis. Fertilizers good for insect numbers. Which means bad for plants? But insect diversity? Wonder what they do to those earthworms and fungi above…
Taking Vital Sign’s temperature
It completely escaped our notice that a project called Vital Signs was launched a few months ago in Africa with a $10 million, 3-year grant from the Gates Foundation. The grantees are Conservation International, The Earth Institute and South Africa’s Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, and the idea is as follows:
The Vital Signs Africa monitoring system provides near-real time data and diagnostic tools to inform agricultural development decisions and monitor their outcomes. Vital Signs metrics and indicators will verify that investments to improve food production also support healthy natural systems and robust livelihoods for smallholder farmers.
Very worthy, and right up our alley here at the Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog, which makes it all the more galling that we didn’t pick up on it earlier. Anyway, some preliminary results for one area in Tanzania (the Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor of Tanzania, or SAGCOT) were presented at the recent AGRA Forum in Arusha, which is how we got to hear about it now.
The question, of course, is whether agricultural biodiversity is being monitored, along with such things as population density, household income, value of biodiversity and fuelwood availability, which are among the data categories that were discussed in Arusha. That “value of biodiversity” does sound promising, but then you read only that “through park entry fees, photography permits and other sources of income, this value is estimated to be more than US$ 650 million per year in the SAGCOT.”
The project’s website is not much help, as it has little beyond some admittedly very nice photographs. But I guess it’s early days yet. I have contacted the people concerned and hopefully I’ll be able to report back very soon.
It is interesting that the Gates Foundation is using Vital Signs as an example of its interest in, and commitment to, agroecological approaches to agricultural development, though whether the project qualifies is disputed.
Brainfood: Wild barley drought tolerance, GM cassava retraction, Lupinus ploidy, Diversity levels
- SSR analysis of introgression of drought tolerance from the genome of Hordeum spontaneum into cultivated barley (Hordeum vulgare ssp vulgare). Scary thing is that only two wild accessions are involved.
- Transgenic Biofortification of the Starchy Staple Cassava (Manihot esculenta) Generates a Novel Sink for Protein. Fancy biotech puts more of a substance in cassava that nobody eats cassava for. No, wait.
- Whole genome duplication in a threatened grassland plant and the efficacy of seed transfer zones. Mixing of seed from different populations can be a good idea for conservation of rare plants, but not when they also differ in ploidy.
- Genetic diversity in widespread species is not congruent with species richness in alpine plant communities. Cannot use one as a proxy for the other.
Nibbles: Darwin herbarium, Saving seeds, Hunger Season, Grafting, Farmers’ rights, Vitamin A scandal, Plant hunting
- Did you know Darwin collected crop wild relative specimens on the Beagle?
- Saving the Running Conch. And its stories.
- Melinda Gates plugs “Hunger Season.” Including to AGRA, presumably.
- I want a fruit salad tree too.
- If you know how to implement Farmers’ Rights, the ITPGRFA would like to hear from you.
- Don’t keep taking the (vitamin A) pills.
- Hunters, pirates. You pays your money…