Impressive shout-out for the IRRI genebank’s use of AI in seed sorting by Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon and Amazon Web Services and VP at Amazon. Presented a few days ago at the AI for Good Global Summit.
Nibbles: SDG funding, GBIF RoI, Food system revitalisation, Bean Power, British baked beans, Cock beer, Access Agriculture, SCANR, Nuts, Hawaii, USDA livestock, Norway livestock, SPC, and WorldVeg genebanks, Millet ambassador, Mango orchards, Wild foods, Degraded lands, Orphan crops, PPB, Biofortification, Ugali, Variety ID, Variety definitions
- The SDGs need proper long-term financing, say Prof. Jeffrey Sachs and co-authors. Maybe he’d like to have a look at the the Crop Trust’s endowment fund for SDG 2.5?
- There’s a 15x return on investment from the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF)? Ok, do Genesys next.
- Want to revitalize the food system? Think lentils, bananas, kale and walnuts. My take? Why stop there?
- I mean, there’s all sorts of cool pulses besides lentils, nice as they are.
- Really no end to them.
- Want some cock beer with your Lincolnshire beans? I bet you do.
- Shout out for the Access Agriculture farmer-to-farmer educational video platform from the Seed System Newsletter. Nothing on walnuts, alas. Or cock beer.
- As we’re on online resources, there’s also the Support Centre for Agriculture and Nutrition Research (SCANR). It “connects researchers with resources and guidance for carrying out interdisciplinary research related to agriculture, food systems, nutrition, and health.” I wonder what it has to say about walnuts.
- Nut genebank gets an upgrade in Oregon. No, not walnuts, alas. It’s Miller time!
- Lots of genebank action in Hawaii too.
- Livestock also getting the genebank treatment in the US.
- But not just in the US: Norway too. Love these back-from-the-brink stories.
- The regional genebank for the Pacific is one of my favourites.
- It’s up there with that of the World Vegetable Centre, which is getting a write-up in the New Yorker, of all places.
- Of course you can have community-level genebanks too. Here are two examples from India: conserving millets and mangoes.
- Maybe there should be more genebanks for wild food species, but these cool in situ conservation stories will do for now.
- Investing in community farming projects can revitalise degraded lands.
- Those farming project don’t have to involve orphan crops, but it wouldn’t hurt.
- You could do participatory plant breeding on them, couldn’t you. This book says that be just the ticket for rural revitalisation. Lots of revitalisation in these Nibbles.
- They would help with malnutrition where maize biofortification hasn’t worked so well, for example.
- Maize? Maize needs to be decolonized, not biofortified.
- Extension workers need to be better at identifying different crop varieties. IITA is on the case, but doesn’t seem to have thought about putting the data on GBIF. Walnuts next?
- Wait, what’s a variety?
Nibbles: Business, CGIAR & FARA, Agrobiodiversity Index, Beans, Artisanal sake, Nabhan on mezcals, Kernza anniversary, Fish diversity, Amazon trees, Dark extinctions
- Gardening pioneer says “Be as diverse as possible!“
- Frank Elderson, Member of the Executive Board of the ECB and Vice-Chair of the Supervisory Board of the ECB, says businesses should be as biodiverse as possible.
- CGIAR and FARA launch an initiative to transform agriculture in Africa but the role of biodiversity is unclear.
- Maybe they should embrace the Agrobiodiversity Index, now that it has won a big prize.
- Speaking of agricultural biodiversity and prizes, here’s a podcast on the EXARC Experimental Archaeology Award winning project “Investigating the Origin of the Common Bean in the New World.”
- A trio of pieces on agrobiodiverse products: sake, mezcal, Kernza.
- Don’t forget fish need to be as diverse as possible too.
- Ok, not agriculture-related, but this visual essay on finding the tallest tree in the Amazon is really cool.
- Not so cool: some species you can only see in natural history collections. The world is not as diverse as possible.
Brainfood: Domestication treble, Introgression treble, Biodiversity mapping double, Oak conservation, Niche modelling double
- Plant domestication: setting biological clocks. Domestication changed plants’ timekeeping and made them less resilient, but there is variation among the biological clocks of different organs that could tapped in breeding.
- Plant domestication and agricultural ecologies. There have been 7 main paths to plant domestication, or commonalities in the ways that plants were domesticated by people in different parts of the world in the past: ecosystem engineering, ruderal, tuber, grain, segetal, fibre, fruit tree.
- Plants cultivated for ecosystem restoration can evolve toward a domestication syndrome. Ok, maybe 8.
- Diamonds in the Not-So-Rough: Wild Relative Diversity Hidden in Crop Genomes. The cool alleles you spotted in wild relatives may already be in cultivated genomes, and that can save breeders some time and effort.
- Finding needles in a haystack: identification of inter-specific introgressions in wheat genebank collections using low-coverage sequencing data. Ah, here they are.
- Interspecific common bean population derived from Phaseolus acutifolius using a bridging genotype demonstrate useful adaptation to heat tolerance. I guess this is an example of the time that could be saved.
- Mapping potential conflicts between global agriculture and terrestrial conservation. A third of agricultural production occurs in sites of high biodiversity conservation priority, with cattle, maize, rice, and soybean posing the greatest threat and sugar beet, pearl millet, and sunflower the lowest. No word on how many crop wild relatives are threatened, but there’s a cool online mapping tool that could I suppose be used to mash things up.
- Assessing habitat diversity and potential areas of similarity across protected areas globally. At a pinch, this could be used to identify backups for any threatened sites of high biodiversity conservation priority.
- Ex situ conservation of two rare oak species using microsatellite and SNP markers. Watch out for the creeping domestication syndrome though, if these ever get used for restoration :)
- TreeGOER: a database with globally observed environmental ranges for 48,129 tree species. Even more than all the CWRs we did. But no, I don’t know if those oaks are included…
- Ecological Niche Models using MaxEnt in Google Earth Engine: Evaluation, guidelines and recommendations. …but if not you can always work their ranges out for yourself.
Nibbles: AGRA, National security, Filipino fruits, Scuba rice, Tasteless pea, Blue Jay bean, Taiwan genebanks, Agrobiodiversity walks
- NGOs call on USAID to stop supporting AGRA. And not for the first time either.
- Report calls for US to invest more in agricultural research in support of global food security. AGRA unavailable for comment.
- A pean to the fruit trees of the Philippines. I’ll second that.
- Scuba rice comes to Africa. What took it so long?
- Apparently there’s a “wild pea plant” in India in which the flavour gene is turned off, and that’s a good thing. Going to have to look into this.
- A famous Canadian bean makes a come-back. Of course there are famous Canadian beans. More famous than that tasteless pea anyway.
- Nice piece on Taiwan’s crop genebanks. Lots of famous varieties in there no doubt.
- I really like the concept of “agrobiodiversity walks.” There should be one built around that wild tasteless pea.