- Image-Based Goat Breed Identification and Localization Using Deep Learning. Fancy maths can identify goat breeds from photos. Ok, cool, now what?
- AI Naturalists Might Hold the Key to Unlocking Biodiversity Data in Social Media Imagery. Fancy math can often identify common flowers on Flickr. Ok, cool, now what?
- FoodMine: Exploring Food Contents in Scientific Literature. Fancy maths can trawl the literature to pick out the chemical components of different foods. Ok, cool, I guess, now what?
- Cultural and linguistic diversities are underappreciated pillars of biodiversity. Well, yeah. But now what?
- Global priority areas for ecosystem restoration. Fancy maths says restoring 15% of converted lands in identified priority areas could avoid 60% of expected extinctions while sequestering 30% of the total CO2 increase in the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution. Cool, now what?
- An unexpectedly large count of trees in the West African Sahara and Sahel. Wait, does that mean some of the above won’t be necessary?
- Cost and affordability of nutritious diets at retail prices: Evidence from 177 countries. Fancy maths shows that nutritious diets are almost 3 times as expensive as diets supplying basic energy needs, and costs increase with remoteness. Ok, cool, now what?
- Phylogenetic inference enables reconstruction of a long-overlooked outbreak of almond leaf scorch disease (Xylella fastidiosa) in Europe. The olive plague started on almonds. Ok, now what though?
- Genome-wide association study in accessions of the mini-core collection of mungbean (Vigna radiata) from the World Vegetable Gene Bank (Taiwan). Genotyping, phenotyping and fancy maths find that mungbean could grow in temperate conditions. Ok, cool, now what?
- Enhancing the searchability, breeding utility, and efficient management of germplasm accessions in the USDA−ARS rice collection. Genotyping and fancy maths can improve genebank management. Well, yeah, but now what? No, wait, we know exactly now what: digital genebanks!
- Ok, that was a bit of fun, but the important point is that research, no matter how cool, is only the beginning.
Seed production in times of climate change
Interested? It’s the topic of an online symposium planned for 9-11 March 2021. Details on the IPK website.
Biodiversity Information System for Europe loses genebanks?
The Biodiversity Information System for Europe is a partnership between the European Commission and the European Environment Agency. It seems to have recently updated its website. Or at least that’s the impression I got from a recent tweet, so I checked it out. There’s no search function on the site, but some rapid browsing could not turn up any references to genebanks or agricultural biodiversity. So I googled “genebanks in:biodiversity.europa.eu” and I got a hit on a page that is no longer on the site. WayBackMachine turns up a 2016 version with some basic information on genetic resources for food and agriculture, including genebanks, that seems to have disappeared in the interim. Maybe the Biodiversity Information System for Europe has decided to focus on in situ conservation only? It seems a pity, if true.
Nibbles: Crop loss, Soil data, CONABIO stuff, Digging dope, Ceres2030
- There’s a series of interactive workshops to gather feedback on how to measure the Global Burden of Crop Loss. I want an initiative on the Global Burden of Crop Diversity Loss though.
- Soil data makes its way to Google Maps.
- CONABIO has some really excellent agrobiodiversity posters and other resources. Calabazas and amaranth are just the start, so dig away on these orphan crops and others.
- Speaking of digging, ancient people got high. Well there’s a shocker.
- Speaking of shockers: huge literature review says researchers should get to grips with smallholders.
Brainfood: Amazon Neolithic double, Bean fixation, Maize stress, Collecting wild Musa, Bananas from space, Eleusine, Dioscorea, Genomics tool, Clover breeding, Red Data plus, Seed viability, Sustainable coffee, Camel conservation, Ryegrass diversity
- Archaeological expansions in tropical South America during the late Holocene: Assessing the role of demic diffusion. Some agricultural diffusion in lowland South America was the movement of ideas rather than people.
- The origins of Amazonian landscapes: Plant cultivation, domestication and the spread of food production in tropical South America. Where did the farming people and/or ideas move from? The sub-Andean montane forest of NW South America and the shrub savannahs and seasonal forests of SW Amazonia.
- Genetic Diversity, Nitrogen Fixation, and Water Use Efficiency in a Panel of Honduran Common Bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) Landraces and Modern Genotypes. Landraces showed better N fixation, but lower yields, than modern varieties.
- Maize genotypes with deep root systems tolerate salt stress better than those with shallow root systems during early growth. Ok, but? There’s always a but.
- Challenges for Ex Situ Conservation of Wild Bananas: Seeds Collected in Papua New Guinea Have Variable Levels of Desiccation Tolerance. Avoid the basal end of the infructescence. Among other things.
- Detection of banana plants and their major diseases through aerial images and machine learning methods: A case study in DR Congo and Republic of Benin. Yeah but can you apply it to collecting the wild relatives?
- Genetic and genomic resources for finger millet improvement: opportunities for advancing climate-smart agriculture. No way this can be called neglected any longer. But is it still under-utilized?
- Genotyping-by-Sequencing to Unlock Genetic Diversity and Population Structure in White Yam (Dioscorea rotundata Poir.). More landrace variation within countries than among.
- BRIDGE – A Visual Analytics Web Tool for Barley Genebank Genomics. Do white yam next?
- Pedigree analysis of pre-breeding efforts in Trifolium spp. germplasm in New Zealand. Not a huge number of parents have been used, but reasonable diversity in most species.
- Pleistocene climate changes, and not agricultural spread, accounts for range expansion and admixture in the dominant grassland species Lolium perenne L. Lots more unused diversity out there. For now.
- IUCN Red List and the value of integrating genetics. Applying some genetic rules of thumb make some endangered species even more so.
- Variation in Seed Metabolites between Two Indica Rice Accessions Differing in Seed Longevity. Candidate biochemical indicators of impending seed death detected.
- Sustainability strategies by companies in the global coffee sector. They are close to non-existent.
- Camel Genetic Resources Conservation through Tourism: A Key Sociocultural Approach of Camelback Leisure Riding. Camel rides could be used for conservation, but they’ll have to deliver more than just conservation.