- Genebanks, crop wild relatives, friends, even a cool title — this one has it all: The New Potato.
- Latest on the CATIE seed collection.
- The wonder of Ethiopian food.
- Which I guess can include teff again now.
- Digitizing the Smithsonian — fast.
- George Washington Carver celebrated.
- Oh look, there’s a new version of SPAM. Let the GISsing begin.
Harlan III resurfaces, bloodied but unbowed
The Harlan III symposium, dedicated to the Origins of Agriculture and the Domestication, Evolution, and Utilization of Genetic Resources, and initially planned for 2018, is now scheduled for 3-7 June 2019. The call for abstracts and registration are open. Thanks to Anne-Céline Thuillet, on behalf of the organizing committee, for letting us know.
8000 years of agricultural history in two papers
A paper just out in Quaternary Science Reviews provides an overview of the first 3000 years of the spread of cultivated cereals around Eurasia, based on archaeobotanical evidence. The paper has some nice maps, but the press release has a really cool animated gif, which I had no hesitation in stealing.
Here’s a quick summary:
- Before 5000 BCE: farming communities used foothill, alluvial and catchment locations in different parts of Eurasia.
- Between 5000-2500 BCE: crops move around, but remain ecologically constrained, with the Tibetan Plateau and the Asian monsoons separating east from west, and north from south.
- Between 2500-1500 BCE: crops are taken to new thermal and hydrologic contexts, bringing previously isolated agricultural systems together.
And where are we now? Well, for that you need another new paper, this one in PLOS ONE: Regional and global shifts in crop diversity through the Anthropocene. As luck would have it, three phases here too, covering the past 50 years:
- little change in crop diversity from 1961 through to the late 1970s
- a 10-year period of sharp diversification through the early 1980s
- “levelling-off” of crop diversification beginning in the early 1990s
No gif, alas, but there’s a little video accompanying the press release in which the author summarizes the results.
The title of that press release says it all really: “A small number of crops are dominating globally. And that’s bad news for sustainable agriculture.” Compare and contrast with the findings of Colin Khoury and friends from a couple of years back on the increasing homogeneity of global diets. Basically looking at the same data in a somewhat different way: pretty much the same result.
Nibbles: Open data, Banana virus, Potato impact, Peruvian agrobiodiversity, Malagasy Coffea, Evolution experiment, A2S
- “It’s embarrassing if your lab is the only one that isn’t sharing data.” One would hope so, but…
- CRISPR snips out virus from banana genome.
- CIP-related potato varieties are planted on about 1.43 Mha, or 19% of total area.
- Saving Peru’s agricultural biodiversity is more than just about markets.
- I suspect the same is the case for Madagascar’s wild coffees.
- Studying evolution experimentally. Using mice. Plants would have been cooler.
- More on Access to Seeds Index: “Seeds of Nope” seems unnecessarily negative, though.
Crop wild relatives get special treatment
…this Special Volume of Plant Genetic Resources, Characterization and Evaluation is very timely as CWR science finally moves beyond the theoretical to the increasing applied, to meet breeders and consumers growing demands. It includes prioritized CWR inventories at different geographical levels viz. national (Bissessur et al., 2019; Dickson et al., 2019), regional (Allen et al., 2019; Fitzgerald et al., 2019) levels. Tools to facilitate conservation planning have also been developed (Magos Brehm et al., 2019; Holness et al., 2019), and regional conservation strategies and approaches have been developed (Allen et al., 2019; Kell et al., 2016).
Ok, the whole thing is not open access, but at least the introduction to the Special Issue is. And since I’m on the subject, there’s a nice summary just out of the state of wild Coffea in Madagascar. Coincidentally, one of the paper in the special issue is on the CWR of Mauritius, among which Coffea features very prominently.
The wild coffee species that grow in northern Madagascar are genetically similar to Coffea species found on Grande Comore in the Comoros – a volcanic archipelago off the east coast of Africa, near Mozambique. Other species have spread from Madagascar to Mauritius and Reunion Island.