- Agricultural Heritage Systems: A Bridge between Urban and Rural Development. “…agricultural heritage systems can take full advantage of abundant funds…” Really?
- Multi cob-bearing popcorn (Puakzo) maize: a unique landrace of Mizoram, North East, India. Would be nice to know how unique globally.
- Enabled or disabled: Is the environment right for using biodiversity to improve nutrition? Maybe, in some places.
- Orbitide Composition of Flax Core Collection (FCC). In other news, Canada has a flax core collection.
- Farmer Perspectives on OCA (Oxalis tuberosa; Oxalidaceae) Diversity Conservation: Values and Threats. It’s the cultural value, stupid. And weevils.
- The expansion of modern agriculture and global biodiversity decline: an integrated assessment. Fancy maths shows that if you assume that unabated agricultural expansion is bad in a particular way, you can come up with a model which spares land at a modest cost to per capita consumption, given decent investment in research.
- Nuclear genetic variation of Rosa odorata var. gigantea (Rosaceae): population structure and conservation implications. Wild relative of domesticated rose shows lots of diversity and two distinct populations either side of a fault zone in China.
- Worldwide Evaluation of Quinoa: Preliminary Results from Post International Year of Quinoa FAO Projects in 9 Countries. 19 sites, 21 genotypes, a few winners. But the real story is how difficult it was to get hold of the material in the first place.
- Shaping Seed Regulation in Nepal: The Role of Networks, Community and Informality. The formal needs to recognize the informal. And vice versa.
- Crop domestication in the upper Madeira River basin. Nice, brief review of evidence of domestication for a number of crops along one branch of the Amazon.
- Analysing genebank collections using “R”: Making trait information widely available to users. NordGen takes genebank data analysis to the masses. And about time too.
Plant Genetic Resources: Our challenges, our food, our future
As predicted a few days ago, here’s Dr Mike Jackson’s report on that 2 June meeting on plant genetic resources organized by doctoral students at the School of Biosciences, University of Birmingham.
When I was asked to contribute a paper I had to think hard and long about a suitable topic. I’ve always been passionate about the use of plant genetic diversity to increase food security. I decided therefore to talk about the value of genebank collections, how that value might be measured, and I provided examples of how germplasm had been used to increase the productivity of both potatoes and rice.
If you have your own examples, leave a comment on Mike’s blog.
Mythbusters edition
No, mobile phones did not improve the economic welfare of fishermen in Kerala by allowing them to track market prices in different ports. And no, it has not been the antics of environmental activists to stall the adoption of Golden Rice by the world’s poor. Whatever next? The figure for worldwide crop genetic erosion is not 75%? Now, that would be something.
Talking PGR at Brum
The plant genetic resources conference at the University of Birmingham is now over, and the presentations are online, including from Mike Jackson, who I feel sure will say something about it all on his blog soon. And it looks like Svalbard may be in for some British deposits…
Thanks to all speakers and participants at the PGR conf. @unibirmingham Now lets get our UK PGR into Svalbard! pic.twitter.com/2rhbcylS48
— PlantGeneticResource (@PGRBham) June 6, 2016
Hawaiian crop diversity festival
The Indigenous Crop Biodiversity Festival, in Maui, Hawaii, August 24-30, 2016 is a recognized parallel event to the IUCN World Conservation Congress. It offers an opportunity to explore the role of indigenous crop biodiversity conservation in food security and in reducing agricultural impacts to natural ecosystems from practitioners perspectives, as well as a look into island biodiversity conservation, in advance of the Congress. To find out more and to register for any of the many events and site visits of the week, some of which are rarely open to the public, please visit.
You still here?