- Perennial cereal crops: An initial evaluation of wheat derivatives. Early days still.
- Effects of silviculture on native tree species richness: interactions between management, landscape context and regional climate. Encourage mosaics, and don’t harvest everything.
- The global fire–productivity relationship. It’s humped, and will be changed by climate change, though for different reasons for different productivity levels. Wonder about the fire-diversity relationship, though.
- Ancient DNA Analysis Affirms the Canid from Altai as a Primitive Dog. Bit of a judgement call though.
- Genetic structure and diversity of coffee (Coffea) across Africa and the Indian Ocean islands revealed using microsatellites. Just what you would expect, given the “morpho-taxonomic species delimitations and genetic units.”
- Genetic diversity among farmer-preferred cassava landraces in Uganda. Landraces only a bit more diverse than elites overall, but half of them quite different.
- Correspondence between genetic structure and farmers’ taxonomy — a case study from dry-season sorghum landraces in northern Cameroon. Genetic units = farmer-recognized landraces.
- Plant diversity, productivity and nutritive value change following abandonment of public pastures in Japan. The best way to restore productivity (diversity doesn’t change much) in abandoned pastures is to start grazing them again.
- Genetic variability of maize stover quality and the potential for genetic improvement of fodder value. You can improve stover and grain yield simultaneously, in hybrids. In theory.
- Governance regime and location influence avoided deforestation success of protected areas in the Brazilian Amazon. Total protection better than sustainable use. Ouch. Meanwhile, in the USA…
- ICPH 2671 – the world’s first commercial food legume hybrid. Yet another milestone on the road to the complete eradication of farmers’ rights.
- Genetic improvement of grain protein content and other health-related constituents of wheat grain. Need to figure out the genetic control mechanisms, and then exploit “alien” germplasm using MAS. Oh, and GMOs too.
- Quantifying the impacts of bioenergy crops on pollinating insect abundance and diversity: a field-scale evaluation reveals taxon-specific responses. Diversity begets diversity.
- Diversity and geographical gaps in Cajanus scarabaeoides (L.) Thou. germplasm conserved at the ICRISAT genebank. Now collectors know exactly where to go.
- Tree species diversity increases fine root productivity through increased soil volume filling. Below-ground complementarity is good for everyone’s roots, presumably good for the community too.
- Making seed systems more resilient to stress. Foster informal innovation, but also information exchange (presumably including of the formal kind).
Nibbles: Vigna radiata, Brit foods, Botany power, Niche models, Early ag, Fortification, Chicago plants, De-extinction, Kew aroids, Fish farming fail
- WorldVeg fights for the right of Pakistanis to grow mungbean.
- Philosopher thinks the English should fight for einkorn. Oh, and stilton.
- Botanist fights for botany.
- You gotta fight those species distribution models into submission. They don’t come quietly.
- Early farmers made love, not war. Or at least made cultic phallic symbols.
- Indians avoid Golden Rice fight by fortifying their own.
- Chicago fights to save its plants.
- You can’t fight extinction. I mean, once it’s happened.
- Aroids putting up a good fight with showier plants at Kew.
- Aquaculture in a fight for its life as disease looms.
Nibbles: GRISP video, Savory management, Herbarium digitization, Fancy NASA map, Range photos, Fancy phenotyping, Ghana research, African food, Neotropical tree book, Epigenetics of nutrition, Liberian veg seed, Wheat belly, Germany & India
- The future of rice science. It says here.
- Is Holistic Management the SRI of livestock?
- Another online botanical database to contend with. Eventually.
- NASA maps poleward vegetation shift. I suspect the Progressive Cattleman will be onto that in a flash. See what I did there?
- More fancy aerial science, this time at the service of phenotyping. And more of the same.
- Ghana’s agricultural research system deconstructed. Would have been nice to mention the genebank.
- African food, in Africa and America. And in audio.
- Propagating tropical trees for fun and profit.
- The epigenetics of maternal nutrition, courtesy of USDA.
- Liberians showered in seeds.
- Kim, are you listening? This one’s for you.
- IPK reaches out to India.
Nibbles: Nutrition, Expanding corn, Wheat prices, Veg from space, Seed saving film, Gender
Things are slim today, mostly only tangentially related to agricultural biodiversity. But we hate to disappoint…
- The ever-influential Lancet has published a series on non-communicable diseases (many of which are associated with dietary diversity). Marion Nestle has the details.
- The USDA’s conservation program is fighting a losing battle against high corn prices, and everybody suffers (except corn farmers).
- Sell wheat? Prices are high, but forecasts are good.
- Vegscape! If you need a “state-of-the-art, satellite-based U.S. crop condition vegetation assessment and monitoring service”.
- Now this really is agrobiodiverse: A high definition film on seed saving that needs your support.
- This one too: women and bambara groundnut.
“Cromwo” unmasked as Ozoroa insignis
Does anyone know what the scientific name might be for the tree known as cromwo in Pokot #kenya @icraf @cifor_forets
— Luigi Guarino (@AgroBioDiverse) February 28, 2013
For the past week I’ve been in a bit of a tiz trying to identify a tree. Of course I searched for cromwo online, but all that turned up was an echo-chamber in which the “information” originally provided went round and round in a self-congratulatory cacophony. We did get some helpful hints of where to look, but they turned up empty too. “Forget it, Jeremy, it’s Chinatown,” someone said. Like Jake Gittes, I couldn’t do that.
And then it hit me. One of my longest-standing and, I like to think, deepest friendships is with a very famous writer and activist who, when we met, had just returned from an ethnobotanical study among … the Pokot! But that was then. Might she know?
I fired off an email. She fired back a reply designed to prepare me for the worst. And then, bingo!
This is your lucky day!
Kromwo is, according to the Kenyan Agriculture and Research Institute’s Agriculture Research Department’s report on the plants I collected (dated 10th april 1979), Ozoroa insignis Del. (Anacardiaceae)
Plural is Kram.
Certainly was! She’d also dutifully noted one of the uses for kromwo:
Burn and mix with milk for flavour.
I cannot describe how happy this made me, because with a formal scientific name, the “correct” transliteration being not much help, it is possible to go looking for additional information. You can find photographs, scientific investigations of the plant’s biochemical properties, misleading English names, and loads of other stuff.
Scientific names really do matter.