- Food contributes 1/3 of greenhouse gas emissions.
- How we got to the above.
- And a focus on how farming started in South Asia in particular.
- A long-term seed experiment carries on.
- Another chapter in the story of the comeback of the American chestnut?
- Want to help a heirloom make a comeback?
- There’s a newsletter on the law and policy behind all this stuff.
Nibbles: Evidence, Agroecology, Iconography, Cryo
- Educational materials for conservation.
- Seminar on agroecology next week by Professor of Agroecology Steve Gliessman.
- Why is there a citron in Van Eyck’s Ghent altarpiece?
- APPS Special Issue Call for Papers: “Meeting the Challenge of Exceptional Plant Conservation: Technologies and Approaches.”
Citizens map crops and their wild relatives
Our friend and occasional contributor Colin Khoury has made a “project” on iNaturalist focusing on the crop wild relatives found in the USA.
iNaturalist collates and manages citizen science observations of living things, with a machine learning algorithm helping with species identification. If the observation you document on your phone app gets verified by two other people, it’s rated as “Research Grade,” and included in GBIF.
Colin also had a go at pulling together observations on major food crops, though there’s no way of including only observations of cultivated material. This is a map of tepary beans (Phaseolus acutifolius), for example.
Cool, no? Join in! There’s only one observation of Bambara groundnut. Surely we can do something about that.
Want to learn about genebanks (and much much more)?
Thanks to funding from a USDA-NIFA-Higher Education Challenge Grant Program, the good folks at Colorado State University are offering a new online course on Plant Genetic Resources- Genomes, Genebanks, and Growers. You will:
- Discover the origins of plant genetic resources
- Appreciate the role they play in global food systems
- Learn about plant domestication and diversification
- Understand their genetic properties and the forces that shape them
- Explore geographic patterns of plant diversity
It looks great. Find out more here. Starts in August. I’m kinda tempted to take it myself…
Yes we have banana catalogues
Great to hear that recent banana diversity collecting in my old stamping ground of the Pacific1 has resulted in three beautiful germplasm catalogues:
- Rarotonga and Aitutaki, Cook Islands
- Upolu, Samoa
- West New Britain, Papua New Guinea
In due course, this material will end up in the Musa International Transit Centre and will be available for breeding, research and training under the SMTA of the Plant Treaty.
- And, yes, we have blogged about this sort of thing before. And, yes, I do need to stop using this cliche in banana posts. But not today. [↩]