- Cannabis Domestication, Breeding History, Present-day Genetic Diversity, and Future Prospects. The traditional landraces are being contaminated and need urgent collection and evaluation by dedicated professionals.
- Cold sweetening diversity in Andean potato germplasm from Argentina. 5 out of 48 Andigena landraces make good chips.
- Considering cost alongside the effectiveness of management in evidence-based conservation: A systematic reporting protocol. Here comes the metadata. No excuse now.
- Self-compatibility is over-represented on islands. 66% vs 41% in Asteraceae, Brassicaceae and Solanaceae. Any crop wild relatives in the list?
- Cereals, calories and change: exploring approaches to quantification in Indus archaeobotany. Millet may not have been as important as is generally thought.
- High-Throughput Phenotyping of Sorghum Plant Height Using an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle and Its Application to Genomic Prediction Modeling. A near-infrared, green and blue (NIR-GB) camera on a drone gives pretty good results compared to a person with a tape measure, and is much more fun.
- Asian wild rice is a hybrid swarm with extensive gene flow and feralization from domesticated rice. No such thing as completely wild Asian rice.
- The dispute over wild rice: an investigation of treaty agreements and Ojibwe food sovereignty. Not wild rice at all, but what’s been happening to it might be a violation of the White Pine Treaty with the Ojibwe.
- Quantifying pearl millet response to high temperature stress: thresholds, sensitive stages, genetic variability and relative sensitivity of pollen and pistil. The problem is the pistils.
- Effect of environmental change on yield and quality of fruits and vegetables: two systematic reviews and projections of possible health effects. Bad for yield, good for nutritional quality.
Everything about size
Whizz-bang websites in support of data-dense papers seem to be all the rage.
Remember “Farming and the geography of nutrient production for human use: a transdisciplinary analysis,” published in the inaugural The Lancet Planetary Health a couple of weeks back? We included it in Brainfood, and linked to an article by Jess Fanzo which summarizes the main findings. This is probably the money quote:
Both small and large farms play important roles in ensuring we have enough food that is diverse and nutrient-rich. While industrialised agriculture suggests domination of food systems, smallholder farms play a substantial role in maintaining the genetic diversity of our food supply, which results in both benefits and risk reductions against nutritional deficiencies, ecosystem degradation, and climate change. Herrero and colleagues argue that if we want to ensure that the global food supply remains diverse and generates a rich array of nutrients for human health, farm landscapes must also be diverse and serve multiple purposes.
Well, there’s also a graphics-rich website now, “Small Farms: Stewards of Global Nutrition?” The infographic at the left here puts it in the proverbial nutshell (click to embiggen).
But what you really want to know is on what kinds of farms are grown those Canadian and Indian peas we talked about yesterday in connection with other fancy websites. Well, unfortunately, the data are only available for “pulses” here, but, perhaps unsurprisingly, those are grown mainly on large(ish) farms (blue) in North America, and small(ish) farms (orange) in South Asia. Each square is 1% of global production.
You can get similar breakdowns for different food groups (cereals, oils, etc.), and for a bunch of different nutrients: Calcium, Calories, Folate, Iron, Protein, Vitamin A, Vitamin B12, and Zinc. For all of these last you can also see global maps of nutritional yields, or “the number of people who can meet their nutritional needs from all of the crops, livestock, and fish grown in an area.” Here’s the one for Vitamin A.
Which I’m sure will be of use in targeting the promotion of homegardening, say, or the roll-out of things like orange sweet potatoes. There is Biofortification Priority Index already, but only at a fairly coarse, country level. As far as I know, anyway.
Of course, those countries could always import sweet potatoes…
Canadian peas in India
Speaking of nifty websites, I’ve just come across resourcetrade.earth, from Chatham House, which enables
…users to explore the fast-evolving dynamics of international trade in natural resources, the sustainability implications of such trade, and the related interdependencies that emerge between importing and exporting countries and regions.
That of course includes agricultural trade, with the data coming mainly from FAO and USDA. Which means you can do interesting mash-ups with the global diets data we blogged about a couple of days back.
For example, here on the left are the data on the contribution of pulses to total food weight in the Indian diet, courtesy of that fabulous CIAT website. Note the steady increase in pea consumption over the past 30 years or so (click on the image to make it bigger, it’s the plot in the bottom right hand corner).
A lot of those peas, it turns out, now come from abroad, Canada mostly (as you can see on the map below). It’s a $500 million market, up from $30 million in 2000.
Now, I don’t know what proportion of Indian pea consumption is down to Canadian imports, but it should be possible to figure it out. I’m betting a fair bit of the aloo mutter you have in Amritsar is made in Canada.
Mapping “flourishing” genebanks
The Atlas for the End of the World is a collection of maps and infographics covering two important subjects: the first is the amount of protected area in the world’s biodiversity hotspots and how these regions are tracking in regard to meeting 2020 United Nations (Aichi) protected area targets; the second is an assessment of which cities in these hotspots are growing on collision courses with remnant habitat and endangered species.
Nice idea, of course. And given their first aim, as described above, they didn’t really need to do anything on genebanks or botanic gardens. But they did, and here is the resulting map (click to enlarge).
And this is what they say about it:
Even at a glance this map shows the disturbing fact that while the hotspots are being drained of life, small zoological and botanical gardens seem to be flourishing.
Well, I don’t think you can see that, at a glance or otherwise. Plus the choice of genebanks to display is eccentric. And the Vavilov Institute is mislabelled.
Here’s the WIEWS map of genebanks with more than 10,000 accessions.
Can you tell, at a glance, which ones are flourishing?
Exploring global diets
You may remember the paper Increasing homogeneity in global food supplies and the implications for food security, which we blogged about a couple of times when it first came out in 2014. National Geographic did a pretty good job of visualizing some of the data online, but CIAT have blown them out of the water now with a fabulous interactive website.
You can listen to Colin Khoury, the brains behind the whole thing, on Jeremy’s latest Eat This Podcast. And you can read about the most surprising results on CIAT’s blog. Spoiler alert:
1. Almost everybody eats a lot more food than their grandparents did. And it’s more diverse.
2. African, Asian, and small island countries have the world’s most diverse food supplies. Also the least.
3. Crop immigrants are the key to dietary diversity.
4. The world’s average diet means eating like people do in Cape Verde, Colombia, and Peru.
5. Political unrest can lead to greater diversity in people’s diets, or less.
There’s also a companion piece by Colin on the Global Plant Council website. And this is what Colin says on his Facebook page:
We built a big data website! When we published our findings of increasing homogeneity in global food supplies, we hadn’t yet found a good way to make the underlying national-level data readily visible to interested readers. This is why I’m tremendously excited to announce the publication of our new Changing Global Diet website, which provides interactive visuals for 152 countries over 50 years of change. We that hope you will enjoy your own investigations of dietary change over time. Perhaps you can tell us where you think the changing global diet is headed.
If you do play around with the website, you can share any interesting stuff you find using the hashtag #changingglobaldiet on Twitter. Me, I’m going to have a bandeja paisa and feel like a proud citizen of nowhere.