The Biodiversity Heritage Library has this nice montage on its Facebook page, where it asks the question: “Which of the species pictured here lives at the highest altitude of all grazing herds?” You can vote here. I think the answer is the only non-wild sheep of the four, but it could be a trick question.
Prospects for fish (and other) farming
The CGIAR Research Program on Aquatic Agricultural Systems launched recently with this video of what research can do for poor families in Bangladesh, and yes, they’re big on agricultural biodiversity. All they need to do now is stop sea-levels rising …
Nibbles: Livestock, CWR, Extremophiles, Museum exhibits
- How livestock help feed the world.
- The latest CWR newsletter from PGR Secure.
- “…humans have inadvertently been probing the environmental envelope of carbon-based life for thousands of years simply by experimenting with pickling, salting, smoking, and refrigeration.”
- A better way for museums to preserve rice plants. In other news, museums interested in preserving rice plants.
Nibbles: Kenyan blog, Beer, CGIAR squared, Horse domestication
- And Kenya’s best agriculture blog is…Tracking The Scent! Congrats Kio Wachira!
- Drinking beer as an agricultural act.
- CRP4 needs a new name.
- Meanwhile, here’s another example of CGIAR centres working together. Not clear if it’s in a CRP, though, and if so what it is called.
- Horse domesticated once, but with occasional restocking.
Brainfood: Species prioritization, In situ costs, Mycorrhiza, Crop diversity indicator, Diet diversity indicator, Ag & Nutrition, Chestnut blight, Oyster translocation, Maize introgression, Italian asses, New hosts for pests
- Species vulnerability to climate change: impacts on spatial conservation priorities and species representation. Yes, you can focus on sensitive species, but it comes at the cost of representativeness.
- Estimating management costs of protected areas: A novel approach from the Eastern Arc Mountains, Tanzania. Those are $ costs per pixel on the map, which I’ve never seen before. Don’t think they took into account the effects of climate change, though. Maybe they should get in touch with the Aussies above?
- The use of mycorrhizal inoculation in the domestication of Ziziphus mauritiana and Tamarindus indica in Mali (West Africa). It would help.
- A new integrative indicator to assess crop genetic diversity. Includes varietal richness, spatial evenness, between-variety genetic diversity, and within-variety genetic diversity. Not much left, really. Anyway, remember this from last week? Anyone out there going to put 2 and 2 together?
- Assessing Nutritional Diversity of Cropping Systems in African Villages. A new tool! Different from the integrative indicator above! Anyone going to put 4 and 2 together?
- Agriculture-Nutrition Pathways Recognising the Obstacles. “The pathways between agriculture and nutrition seem to be laden with impediments, particularly in the form of intricate household preferences.” Those pesky preferences.
- The chestnut blight fungus world tour: successive introduction events from diverse origins in an invasive plant fungal pathogen. Asia to N. America to Europe, but more than once. All very complicated. The surprising thing is that low diversity and low admixture have nevertheless still resulted in success in disparate places. What fiendish molecular or biochemical mechanism is behind this? Only more research will show, natch.
- Translocation of wild populations: conservation implications for the genetic diversity of the black-lipped pearl oyster Pinctada margaritifera. Introducing some wild individuals near farms leads to more diverse farmed populations, right? Nope. The farmed populations are way diverse already and if anything the diversity is moving the other way.
- Maize x Teosinte Hybrid Cobs Do Not Prevent Crop Gene Introgression. That’s because the hybrid cobs break apart much more easily than maize.
- Detecting population structure and recent demographic history in endangered livestock breeds: the case of the Italian autochthonous donkeys. Microsatellites confirm existence of 8 breeds of Italian donkey, though there is also significant substructuring within each by farm. This apparently calls for a “synergic management strategy at the farm level,” which basically means using the breed as the unit of conservation but being careful about inbreeding.
- Evolutionary tools for phytosanitary risk analysis: phylogenetic signal as a predictor of host range of plant pests and pathogens. Work out host susceptibility by looking at existing pest preferences and phylogenetic distance from the stuff the pest is known to like.