- Bigshots visit CIMMYT, miss opportunity to mention genebank. No, wait…
- Bigshot visits IRRI, including genebank.
- Yeah but who needs those anyway, you can make your own!
- Now the French want their say on quinoa.
- Speaking of the French, you think there is any horsemeat in Cornish pasties?
- “I grew up with zucchini, but I prefer the flavor and texture of angled luffa.”
- Gotta love the fact that there’s a thing called the Rogue Creamery.
- Missed the fact that Leafsnap had been named one of the top 10 science apps of 2012.
- Germans report on Italians helping Ethiopians. To keep bees. One suspects Ethiopians could teach Italians and Germans a thing or two about keeping bees, but that’s another story.
Nibbles: Maize genes, Livestock domestication, Guinea fowl, Plant identification, Juniper conservation, Cacao conservation, Seed talk, IPBES report, Global consultation
- Today’s genomic breakthrough involves kernel number in maize.
- Neolithic people overhunted, then thought better of it.
- Was guinea fowl ever domesticated, I wonder?
- How to figure out if you’ve looked hard enough. For plants, that is. And some discussion.
- Gin is in trouble. But help is at hand.
- A workshop on chocolate and vanilla. My kinda event. And chocolate does need help. Gin, chocolate. Pretty soon life wont be worth living.
- Simran Sethi’s Twitter chat after TEDxManhattan was storified, but it’s gone now of course. Try this instead.
- Final say on that IPBES-1 gabfest.
- And the first say on that “Global Consultation on agricultural biodiversity for sustainable food security” thing.
Nibbles: Fisheries, Aquaculture, Oman GR centre, Neighbourhood farm, Striga control, Quinoa blog
- Indonesians integrate biodiversity with development.
- Aquaculturists integrate catfish and tilapia with carp.
- Omanis want to integrate genetic resources conservation regionally.
- A community integrates around a neighbourhood farm.
- Integrated solutions needed for Striga? Push-pull, anyone?
- New blog aims to integrate quinoa into Chilean diets.
Nibbles: Farm size, Evidence-based policy, Priority sites, Tibetan grasslands, Sustainable intensification, Lipid improvement, Medicinal plants, Local fish, Wheat access, Purple yam,
- Small is beautiful. No, wait… And more from where that came, ahem, from.
- Evidence? We don’t need no stinking evidence.
- CIAT blogs about a workshop about a model about prioritization about populations about breeding about beans. While its peach palm thing gets picked up.
- Tibetan grasslands feel the heat. Not entirely certain why ICRAF should care, but it’s good to know.
- Peaches compatible with maize in Bolivian agrobiodiversity hotspot. Not nearly enough info in this release, will need to chase it up. And here it is.
- Rothamstead engineers lipids. But it’s for better nutrition, so that’s ok.
- Trad med in RSA.
- Fish as an ingredient of complementary foods. Nutritious, I’m sure, but I suspect Crocodile Dundee’s comment on the iguana applies.
- US wheat breeders worried about access. Maybe if the country ratified the ITPGRFA?
- Filipinos really like purple sweets, apparently. Here are some made of purple yam, ube, Dioscorea alata, call it what you will.
Brainfood: Vitamin C, Nutrition and health, European protected areas, Coffea diversity, Climate change modelling, Soil microbes, Niche modelling, Conflict, Human modified landscapes, Horse diversity, Pigeon diversity
- The challenge of increasing vitamin C content in plant foods. Surely not just because it is challenging?
- Health economics and nutrition: a review of published evidence. “[A]pproaches and methodologies are sometimes ad hoc in nature and vary widely in quality.” Ain’t that always the way.
- European protected areas: Past, present and future. The future will need to be different from the past.
- Genetic structure and diversity of coffee (Coffea) across Africa and the Indian Ocean islands revealed using microsatellites. Good correspondence with morphological species. Madagascar a diversity hotspot.
- Special Issue of Agricultural and Forest Meteorology on Agricultural prediction using climate model ensembles. There’s more than one way to identify a potential adaptation hotspot. Well that’s reassuring. Not.
- Changes in soil microbial functional diversity under different vegetation restoration patterns for Hulunbeier Sandy Land. Restoring desertified grassland led to more soil microbial diversity. Which is good because…?
- A review of composition studies of Cameroon traditional dishes: Macronutrients and minerals. 117 of them. Good for Fe, Zn, Mg.
- Essential elements of discourse for advancing the modelling of species’ current and potential distributions. There’s lots of methods, all quite different, embrace the diversity.
- Understanding and managing conservation conflicts. Build up an evidence base, and employ some social scientists to explain it.
- On the hope for biodiversity-friendly tropical landscapes. In the end, it’s about the agriculture. In more ways than one.
- Genetic Diversity in the Modern Horse Illustrated from Genome-Wide SNP Data. High maternal, low paternal during domestication. Low diversity breeds the ones you’d expect. Similar breeds the ones you’d expect.
- Genomic Diversity and Evolution of the Head Crest in the Rock Pigeon. Middle Eastern origins, Darwin vindicated. Again.