- Norwich boffins save the world. To get the real story, you need to deconstruct the piece using this.
- “Results indicate that the greatest agriculture-led growth opportunities in West Africa reside in staple crops (cereals and roots and tubers) and livestock production.” Minor crops get the shaft again?
- Project tackles conservation of Asian farm animal diversity. I’ve always wondered whether there might be a role for ecotourism. I’d pay to see weird cocks. And hens.
- Pakistani boffins return home with skills to improve wheat P efficiency. And the resources? We shall see.
- Chinese food and plant semiotics. Can’t wait for LanguageLog to get to grips with this.
- NordGen characterizes a weirdly-named exotic Cinderella crop. Can you guess which?
- And can you guess what the “best kept secret of agricultural success” might be? Clue: nothing to do with those East Anglian boffins of the first item.
- Participatory plant breeding and gender analysis. They’re not giving much away at the source site.
Brainfood: Ag vs biodiversity, Bioinformatics, Genomic association, Diversity and productivity in forests, Increasing diversity
- Land, Food, and Biodiversity. Agriculture will expand, but that is bad for biodiversity. It probably must expand, actually, but this can be kept to a minimum by addressing land-use planning, governance and law enforcement, productivity, and market drivers. Oil palm as an example.
- Time to change how we describe biodiversity. By finally tackling the digitization of phenome annotations, apparently. NiM 1
- Genomic and metabolic prediction of complex heterotic traits in hybrid maize. Amazingly, genotype (SNP) can predict phenotype (biomass traits) pretty well. But in a population where a bunch of dents were crossed with a couple of testers. Will it work with a diverse genebank collection of landraces?
- Forest productivity increases with evenness, species richness and trait variation: a global meta-analysis. In over 50 studies, polycultures come out about 24% better than monocultures, with evenness having more of an effect than richness. Much more commentary and context at ConservationBytes.com. Compare with that recent drylands diversity and ecosystem function paper.
- All Is Not Loss: Plant Biodiversity in the Anthropocene. A model says there have been “gains in exotics caused by species invasions and the introduction of agricultural domesticates and ornamental exotic plants”. Oooh! Contrarian!
Celebrating the donkey
It looks like the biennial Donkey and Mule Conference, usually held on the Greek island of Hydra, will take place in London this year, appropriately enough during International Donkey Week in May. So Prof. William Gervase Clarence-Smith of the School of Oriental and African Studies and Ed Emery, the conference organizer, inform DAD-Net anyway. I coudn’t find a website, but the last livestock-themed SOSA conference even had a Facebook page, so there must be one in the offing.
Starving Striga of essential micronutrients
Interesting, and temporally confusing, news item from Wageningen University. Dated 12 January, it tells us that on 11 January Muhammad Jamil will be defending his doctoral research on the very pretty but also very devastating parasitic weed Striga. 2 And fascinating research it is too.
Striga seeds germinate in response to strigolactones, which are secreted by the host plant’s roots, and which effectively tell the parasite that there is a host nearby. Strigolactones are made from carotenes, which are the precursors of vitamin A, an essential micronutrient for people. Jamil’s research shows that the less carotene a plant produces, the less likely it is to be parasitised by Striga. Jamil also demonstrated considerable differences among rice varieties in the amount of strigalactones they produce under identical conditions.
Which raises lots of lovely questions. Will crops bred for higher levels of carotene — say to improve human nutrition — be more susceptible to Striga parasitism? Is the solution to breed those self-same crops to block the production of strigalactones? Could this be a job for life for high-tech plant breeders? And what’s wrong with the push-pull approach to controlling Striga? Does it, for example, not work on rice?
I do hope Muhammad is now Dr Jamil.
Early warning system for heritage sites online
A propos of that idea to have a mobile phone app for documenting erosion of agricultural biodiversity. Only fair to say that the Global Heritage Network have a website that records threats to heritage sites. Can the app be far behind?
LATER: Or it did. I can’t get it to work.