In situ

Nibbles: Hunter gatherers, Amaranthus and corn in Mexico, Protected areas and poverty, African ag, Pollan, Aquaculture in Laos, Range, Rainforest

Pygmies forced to take up gardening, and they’re mad as hell about it.
An amaranthus a day… And also from Mexico, saving maize from GMO nastiness. Oh, and the NYTimes does a number on maize domestication today to boot.
Protected areas not so bad for people after all. But do they conserve biodiversity effectively? At least when community-managed, that is.
African agriculture in theory and practice. Glib, I know. Get your own blog.
Pollan does his usual shtick. But he does it well.
You are subscribing to Danny’s nutrition thing, are you not? If you were, you’d know about the role of aquatic rice field species in rural Laotian diets.
So how do you restore prairie? Expert opinion summarized and synthesized to within an inch of its life. But you can also hear from a range expert directly.
Ok, so that’s grassland. If you wanted to restore a tropical rainforest you’d have to know about long-distance seed dispersal.

Dinka men despise manual labour, hence “southern Sudan might soon be on the block for having a lot of its potential farm land leased to, and worked by, foreigners”.
Maasai, on the other hand, “diversifying into cropping, by keeping fewer and faster growing animals and … taking on paying jobs”. Takes all sorts.
What is a small farm? Depends.
Coffee contains insecticides. Who knew?
Global Coffee Quality Research Initiative (GCQRI) launched.
Central America’s coffee lands to shrink under climate change, Reuters reports. Enough! I’ve got the shakes.
Africa, meanwhile, needs technological innovations to cope.
Domesticating baobab. You know it makes sense.
Take two snacks in the morning and call me if you don’t feel any better.
Climate change will affect Portuguese ex situ plant conservation sites too.
“How best can communities conserve their medicinal plants?” A case study from China.
Bolivia could make more of its Araceae and Bromeliaceae. Couldn’t we all?
Are protected areas in Africa harbouring crop wild relatives? Just kidding: it’s invasives IUCN is talking about.

Measuring micronutrients and stuff in potatoes.
Kew wants you to adopt a seed, save a species. Easy as that.
Maybe religion can do some good in the world after all? Allow me to be skeptical.
Wait, can I change my mind? The wonderfulness that is Japanese penis festivals. Well, they mainly take place in the spring. Agrobiodiversity mainly grows in the spring. There is a connection, surely.

Hang on, there’s a “revised and updated” Global Strategy for Plant Conservation. When did that happen?
Gary Nabhan on following in Vavilov’s footsteps. You can hear him in person in Rome this Friday.
Can you protect both agriculture and wildlife? Apparently so.

Sorghum going to need a hand in India. Rice in China? Maybe not so much.
Photos of the 6th Annual Hawaii Seed Exchange.
More Pacific stuff: 3000-year-old Lapita chickens were haplogroup E, “a geographically widespread major haplogroup consisting of European, Middle Eastern, Indian, and Chinese domestic chickens.”
More on that thing about the gut biota being adapted to ethnic diets.
Wolves may have been turned into dogs earlier than previously thought.
Organic farming good for underground mutualists. Which sounds totally appropriate somehow.
Crop wild relatives: all you ever needed to know.
Bring back bees by bringing back the boy scout bee-keeping badge.
Here’s a weird one. US to cut 1.5 trillion calories from food by 2015. And there are 1 billion hungry. You do the math.
Farmers rear endemic moths on intercropped host plants for high quality silk in Madagascar. Enough hot buttons in there for ya?