- “Housed in the towering old 1926 Sonoma County Bank, it’s hard to miss the Seed Bank.” And who would want to anyway.
- Of apples, leaf miners and bacteria. Great story.
- Best synthesis and analysis of the Mongolian dzud story so far.
- Visualize your GPS data! Not agrobiodiversity, I know, but I don’t have another blog.
- Coca myths debunked. Sniff sniff.
- “Crop domestication and the first plant breeders” book charpter online.
- Rebranding Asian carp. Hard row to hoe. Thanks, Don.
- 190,000 year old clothes had lice. 190,000 year old humans had clothes?
- More citizen science stuff, this one on effect of climate change on plant phenology in the US.
- IFAD publishes bunch of livestock-related papers. ILRI, are you listening?
- “It’s 36 percent more efficient to grow grain for food than for fuel.” Good to have a number.
- Boffins do their aDNA thing on Chinese pigs, find continuity, multiple domestication, sweet and sour sauce recipe.
- Soil Association begs to differ on that whole
UKworld-needs-to-double-food-production thing.
Food technology: Life imitates Art
Run, don’t walk, to Nicola’s latest post over at Edible Geography, Multifunctional Desserts. I guarantee that you will emerge wiser and in a better mood than when you arrive, plus you’ll be able to fill empty moments in conversations with more fun food factoids, and other nuggets of information, that you had ever thought possible.
What’s it about?
Do me a favour, just go.
Nibbles: Quasi conservation, Prioritization, Nabhan, Wild sunflower in Argentina, Pests and diseases, Ethiopian honey, African beer, Ash, Camel milk, Livestock conference, Bull breeding, Goldman Environmental Prize, Anastasia
- Another nail in the coffin of Cartesian dualism in conservation? Yeah, right. Oooooh, here’s another. What next? Conservation-vs-use to bite the dust?
- Now here’s a thing. Priority setting in conservation for plants in Turkey and sheep in Ethiopia. Compare and contrast.
- “Bad-ass eco warrior” quoted on … apples.
- Invasive species can be good … when they are sunflower wild relatives.
- Pests and diseases: “New solutions could include novel resistant cultivars with multiple resistance genes, suitable epigenetic imprints and improved defence responses that are induced by attack.” I’ll get right on that. And more from Food Security.
- Rare Ethiopian honey becoming rarer.
- Also rare are micro-breweries in Africa. Alas.
- Volcano bad for British diet. And Kenyan jobs.
- So let them drink camel milk!
- Conference on Sustainable Animal Production in the Tropics. Doesn’t sound like much fun? It’s in Guadeloupe!
- And, there will probably be photographs of bulls of “stunning scrotal circumference.” Convinced yet?
- “Rios won for his work promoting a return to more traditional farming techniques focusing on seed diversity, crop rotation and the use of organic pest control and fertilizers to both increase crops and improve the communist-led island’s environment.”
- Our friend Anastasia does Seed Magazine: “Until broader efforts to reduce poverty can take hold, crops with improved nutrients could be very important in reducing death and disease caused by nutrient deficiencies.”
Nibbles: Teosinte, Books, Striga control, Civet coffee, Frog poaching, Edible flowers
- How teosinte lost its shell. Not another Just-so story
- Search more than 450 publications from Bioversity International. Just-so!
- Push-pull solution to maize pests in Africa. What again? Yes, again! Just do it.
- “One time, harvesters sold her regular beans glued to unidentified dung.” And more weird food naughtiness.
- Flowers you can eat.
An early look at an atlas of agrobiodiversity
On reading about the Atlas of Global Conservation here a few days ago, Nora Castaneda of Bioversity International’s Regional Office for the Americas sent me some of her own forays in that area, which are focused on plant species of agricultural interest. They’re still works in progress, and unpublished, 1 but definitely worth having a quick look at. The data comes from germplasm databases (SINGER, GRIN, EURISCO) and the databases put together for the GapAnalysis project, about which we have already blogged about here.
Here’s what the distribution of numbers of accessions of varieties of the major food crops in genebanks looks like. Dark brown means lots of different accessions (not varieties, mind!).
One has to wonder what’s going on in Spain. As I say, it’s a work in progress. A certain amount of data cleaning may still be necessary, for example to identify duplicates and take them out of the equation. And when Genebank Database Hell allows it should even be possible to take into account morphological and genetic diversity.
Anyway, here’s the distribution of richness of wild relative and landrace accessions of a number of major crops. Green means lots of species and landraces.
When finished, I think these maps will make a great complement to the Nature Conservancy’s Atlas. But would the biodiversity community be interested?