- Palau finds salt-tolerant taros.
- Elsewhere in the Pacific, researchers try to revive bele. That would be aibika. Or slippery kabis. Or Abelmoschus manihot.
- Which is a polyploid, isn’t it? Not to mention perennial.
- Bound to be lots of Pacific stuff at the Society for Economic Botany’s meeting, going on NOW. No, wait, it’s ending today. Bummer.
- Did you know that the first formal plant disease record in the Pacific region was from wheat, grown in Sydney by the first colonists? Well, I’m not entirely sure if that’s true, but it’s a way of introducing this blog on wheat in this Pacifically-themed Nibbles.
- Agrikalsa Nius is the monthly electronic newsletter of the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock of the Solomon Islands.
Brainfood: Phenology & CC, Potato nutrition, Buckwheat honey, Visitors in parks, Urban gardeners, Introgression from wild sheep, Catholic conservation, Tomato domestication
- Herbarium specimens reveal the footprint of climate change on flowering trends across north-central North America. 2.4 days per °C.
- Carotenoid profiling in tubers of different potato (Solanum sp) cultivars: Accumulation of carotenoids mediated by xanthophyll esterification. 60 cultivars, including landraces, fall into 3 main groups. Need to keep an eye out for those xanthophyll esters.
- Buckwheat honeys: Screening of composition and properties. In other news, there is monofloral buckwheat honey in Italy and E. Europe. But not as much as the producers say.
- Using geotagged photographs and GIS analysis to estimate visitor flows in natural areas. Very cool, but try as I might I cannot think of an application in agricultural biodiversity conservation. Maybe you can.
- Quiet sustainability: Fertile lessons from Europe’s productive gardeners. Food gardening in Europe’s cities is not about an “urban peasantry” putting essential food on the table. And it’s not about expousing a yuppie alternative lifestyle. It’s just about the sheer fun of it.
- Introgression and the fate of domesticated genes in a wild mammal population. Coat colour polymorphisms in wild Soay sheep was caused by admixture with more modern breed 150 years ago.
- Catholicism and Conservation: The Potential of Sacred Natural Sites for Biodiversity Management in Central Italy. So apparently there’s a “common view that Christianity is anti-naturalistic.” Well, it’s wrong. What’s Christianity’s view of agrobiodiversity, I wonder?
- Comparative transcriptomics reveals patterns of selection in domesticated and wild tomato. DNA differences due to selection at 50 genes, transcription differences at thousands.
Nibbles: Tea nomenclature, Medicinal plants, Robert Fortune, Gender gap, Japanese women farmers, AnGR conservation, Herbarium databases, India & Africa
- Tea diversity 101.
- Tea is medicinal, isn’t it? Certainly some other plants introduced to the West by the same person are.
- I could tell you all about the gender gap in tea cultivation in Kenya.
- And I bet there’s one in Japan too.
- Not to mention in livestock-keeping. But I don’t suppose that will affect (ILRI’s) plans for a
Kenyanlivestock genebank. - Crowdsourcing herbarium data. Maybe there’s some specimens of wild tea species in there…
- India reaches out to Africa. ICRISAT involved. Debal Deb, probably not so much. Chai, anyone?
Nibbles: Potato diversity sites, Potato market, Smallholders and markets, CIP genebank, African potato meet, Japanese fries & eels, Micronutrients, Pickling book
- Setting up a network of high potato diversity sites for in situ conservation. It has a Facebook page, so “Like” it.
- Some of that diversity will no doubt find its way to Lima’s markets.
- If not, Leaping and Learning will tell you how. And why.
- There’s a lot of diversity in genebanks too, of course. And thank goodness for that!
- Potatoes are important in Africa too.
- And Japan. But do they go with eels?
- What are potatoes like for micronutrients? Probably better than you think. But could be better?
- If not, you can always pickle them. Can’t you?
Ancient American agrobiodiversity podcasts galore, and more
No sooner had I digested (as it were) Jeremy’s latest offering, that I ran across two other recent podcasts also on subjects related to ancient American agriculture. Archaeologist Dr David Lentz discusses the Pompeii of Central America in the latest Academic Minute. And environmental journalist Sam Eaton talks about the resurgence of amaranth in Mexico. Never rains but it pours.
Well, since it’s raining so hard, let me throw in a couple of related tidbits. If you’ve got a paper on amaranth or any other similarly downtrodden crop, you have until 15 July to put in an abstract for the 3rd International Conference on Neglected and Underutilized Species, to be held in Accra, Ghana on 25-27 September 2013. And if you’re Brazilian, and you’re interested in studying agrobiodiversity in Latin America, including NUS no doubt, you have until June 30 to apply for a studentship. And finally there is the IX Simposio Internacional de Recursos Genéticos para América Latina y el Caribe in El Salvador in November.
LATER: Talk about zeitgeist. Here’s another little something for the weekend for all you NUS aficionados: there’s a special issue of Sustainability in the works on “Underutilized Plant Species: Leveraging Food and Nutritional Security, and Income Generation.” Deadline for manuscript submissions: 30 November 2013.