- Rapid adaptive increase of amylase gene copy number in Indigenous Andeans. Indigenous Andean populations evolved exceptionally high copy numbers of the AMY1 salivary amylase gene, likely linked to long-term adaptation to starch-rich diets associated with potato domestication roughly 10,000 years ago.
- Horse genetics, archaeology, and the beginning of riding. Horse domestication was not a sudden genetic event beginning around 2200–2100 BCE, but a long and regionally varied process in which Indigenous Eurasian pastoralists progressively managed, rode, milked and selectively bred multiple horse lineages over many centuries, transforming mobility and social organization well before the rise of the dominant modern domestic horse lineage.
- Bridging biodiversity and food systems: A nationwide synthesis of non-conventional food plants (PANCs) in Brazil. Brazil’s non-conventional food plants (PANCs) and associated Indigenous and traditional knowledge could help build more diverse, climate-resilient and socially inclusive food systems while strengthening biodiversity conservation, rural livelihoods and public food programs.
- Indigenous Wisdom for a Changing World: Bridging Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Biodiversity Conservation. Sacred groves and other community-managed landscapes in central Ethiopia conserve high levels of biodiversity through Indigenous institutions, ritual practices and traditional ecological knowledge, suggesting that effective conservation depends on treating cultural stewardship systems as integral to ecological resilience rather than as secondary to scientific management.
- When Knowledge Isn’t Free: Legal and Ethical Imperatives of Protecting Indigenous Intellectual Property. There’s a persistent mismatch between Western intellectual-property regimes and Indigenous concepts of collective ownership, biocultural heritage and intergenerational custodianship of knowledge, and that’s unfair.
- Crediting and citing Indigenous Knowledges within research. Biodiversity conservation becomes more effective when Indigenous scientists and communities participate as equal partners rather than merely as local stakeholders or informants.
Nibbles: Svalbard prize, Rice breeding, Coffee geography, Biodiversity loss monitoring, Spatial data
- The Svalbard Global Seed Vault gets the Princesa de Asturias Prize for international cooperation. Time to celebrate.
- Celebrating Pamela Ronald and scuba rice.
- Celebrating Ohsoon Yun and the geography of coffee.
- I’ll certainly celebrate if the approach of the NATURE-FIRST project can be applied to loss of agricultural biodiversity one day.
- The World Bank is in a celebratory mood with regards to geospatial and Earth observation data. I’ll join them when they fund a NATURE-FIRST for crop diversity.
Brainfood: Spatial data edition
- The ClimSat classification system—a global climate classification map based on long-term satellite-derived data. There’s a new global climate classification system in town, and it’s better ecologically than Köppen’s.
- The first global agricultural field boundary map at 10 m resolution. Combined with the above, we can now characterize the climate of every agricultural field in the world.
- GEM-Forest: A Global satellite EMbedding–based map of forests and tree crops for 2020. Do any of those fields have tree crops? And how far is the forest?
- Global annual cropland dynamics 2015–2024. The next time we map agricultural field boundaries, there will probably be more of them.
- Climate-induced range shifts support local plant diversity but don’t reduce extinction risk. Those new agricultural fields will be bad for wild plants.
- ‘SiteTool’: a ‘Shiny’ application for field site selection and evaluation. Cool new tool helps you select geographical sites based on ecological characteristics. Could be used to help decide where to collect or evaluate germplasm. Lots of opportunities for combining with some of the above, I suspect.
- Current and future potential of cassava (Manihot esculenta) in Southern Africa: a scoping review. An example of what you can do when you combine different types of spatial (and other data). The area suitable for cassava in Africa will increase, and there’s lots of scope for higher yields too. If we can combine datasets, soon we’ll know which specific fields to grow it in, for higher production, to protect wild biodiversity…
- Global and regional climate modes modulate armed conflict risk. …and to mitigate the risk of conflict.
Brainfood: Clonal crops edition
- Ancient DNA reveals 4000 years of grapevine diversity, viticulture and clonal propagation in France. Vegetative propagation of grapevines has been going on since the Iron Age.
- High-throughput olive germplasm classification using morphological phenotyping and machine learning. Olive may be generally vegetatively propagated, but you still have to characterize the fruits.
- Varietal Diversity Analysis of Date Palm and Identification of High Agro-Economic Genotypes in Middle Draa. About half of of the date palms in the middle Draa of Morocco are actually from seed. That makes their diversity difficult to conserve.
- Genebank tools for efficient management of viral infections in tropical clonal crops. All those clonal crops need to be kept clean in genebanks. Here’s how.
- Genome degradation in plant tissue culture. All those clonal crops also need to be kept genetically stable in genebanks, and it can be tricky.
Nibbles: Crop mapping, Climate change impacts, Rice cheese, Andean blueberry, Rare apples, Hungarian genebank, Old seed collection
- AI doesn’t recognize tropical agriculture very well.
- So presumably it can’t easily be used in assessing climate change impacts in agricultural heritage systems? FAO has some ideas on how to do it.
- Maybe rice heritage systems can be used to make cheese.
- I bet Andean blueberry (Vaccinium floribundum) goes great with rice cheese.
- But if not, heritage apples will probably do.
- The Hungarian genebank is hoping to inject heritage grains into non-heritage agricultural systems. AI and FAO unavailable for comment.
- Maybe AI can help with the mystery of this old seed collection at the Natural History Museum, London.