In situ

Nibbles: Organic breeding, Agroforestry, Metallophytes, Fermentation, Grain storage

Meta-analysis or no meta-analysis, breeders still want to breed for organic conditions.
Farm Radio does tree farming.
A plea for metallophytes. Every damn plant group has a lobby these days. I bet some of them are crop wild relatives though.
As does almost every style of food preparation. Although I have to say I myself can never read enough about fermentation.
This video is advertised as being about food preservation, and I was going to link it to the above, but it turns out to be about seed storage. Which is interesting enough, and important too, but not the same thing. A clever video, which I personally think doesn’t in the end make its point.

Don’t underestimate the importance of a new book on the Irish Famine, despite the weird construction used in praising it.
Impossible to overestimate the importance of crop breeding for climate change adaptation. And would you like a presentation with that?
Cannot underestimate the diversity of early Neolithic diets. No, wait.
Difficult to overestimate the contribution made by Prof. Randy Thaman to the conservation of agrobiodiversity in the Pacific. One of several honoured by IUCN for services to conservation.
Fed up with linguistic tricks? Well, too bad, because here’s another one. It turns out you can use agricultural biodiversity terminology as examples to explain what’s wrong with ecology.
Here we go again. Easy to underestimate the importance of IPR legislation in enabling smallholders to conserve agrobiodiversity.
Plain impossible to list the x best botanical gardens in the world.

Analysis of threats to South American flora and its implications for conservation. Bottom line: Ecuadorian and Colombian Andes, southern Paraguay, the Guyana shield, southern Brazil, and Bolivia. But don’t let that divert your attention from the cool maps.
Management increases genetic diversity of honey bees via admixture. No genetic bottleneck there. And the same in more words, but not as many as the original paper.
Phylogeography of Asian wild rice, Oryza rufipogon: a genome-wide view. When in doubt, throw more markers at it. Two groups in O. rufipogon, only the Chinese/Indochinese one related to cultivated rice (indica). Japonica out on a limb. And the longer version.
Legume Diversity Patterns in West Central Africa: Influence of Species Biology on Distribution Models. Temperature variables are most important.
Multiple domestications of the Mesoamerican gene pool of lima bean (Phaseolus lunatus L.): evidence from chloroplast DNA sequences. Andean and Mesoamerican cultivated genepools confirmed, and two sub-genepools within the latter, one originating in western central Mexico and the other between Guatemala and Costa Rica. Will they mash up with the study in the first link? Some of the people involved are neighbours and friends.

Within days of each other, surveys have been announced on Who is working on agricultural biodiversity? and On-farm management of PGRFA. I don’t know if there’s a connection between the two. Is something brewing out there? I think we should be told.

Faidherbia albida gets another push. To quote from the recent Crops for the Future dissection of neglected/underutilized species: if it’s so good, how come it’s not used more?
The Indo-European roots of names for pulse crops. Not nearly as boring as it sounds. Oh, and since we’re on the subject…
Human biodiversity files: athleticism, foodism.
Huge EU project monitors pollinators. What could possibly go wrong?
Cleaning up DNA Sequence Database Hell.
Nice biodiversity hotspot maps. No plants. Definitely no agrobiodiversity.
A philosopher’s take on that organic agriculture meta-analysis.
Not Musa, but still edible.