- Reducing Hunger with Payments for Environmental Services (PES): Experimental Evidence from Burkina Faso. Paying farmers during the lean season for keeping trees alive results in better diets and livelihoods.
- Payments for Conservation of Animal Genetic Resources in Agriculture: One Size Fits All? No, pay pig prices for pigs and sheep prices for sheep. No word on effects on diets and livelihoods.
- Factors influencing the adoption of agroforestry by smallholder farmer households in Tanzania: Case studies from Morogoro and Dodoma. Mainly access to seeds and land. No word on effects on diets and livelihoods.
- Seed production areas are crucial to conservation outcomes: benefits and risks of an emerging restoration tool. Somebody mention seeds?
- Trees and their seed networks: The social dynamics of urban fruit trees and implications for genetic diversity. Maybe just source your seeds from cities?
- Maximum levels of global phylogenetic diversity efficiently capture plant services for humankind. Species chosen from diverse lineages are more diversely useful than species chosen at random. Now to make sure seeds are available.
- Aquatic biodiversity enhances multiple nutritional benefits to humans. Basically the above, but with fish.
- Improving Nutritional and Functional Quality by Genome Editing of Crops: Status and Perspectives. Or, we could just genetically edit some random species, fish or otherwise.
- Exploring, harnessing and conserving marine genetic resources towards a sustainable seaweed aquaculture. Maybe even seaweeds?
- Picturing the future of food. I wonder if the high-throughput phenotyping described here will work on seaweeds.
- New cassava germplasm for food and nutritional security in Central Africa. 16x greater fresh root yield than the local landrace check wouldn’t need fancy phenotyping to pick up.
- Reliable genomic strategies for species classification of plant genetic resources. This high throughput genotyping and data analysis approach certainly seems to work in picking up misidentified crop wild relatives in genebank collections. No word on seaweeds yet though.
- Grasspea, a critical recruit among neglected and underutilized legumes, for tapping genomic resources. Including its wild relatives, of course.
- An integrative skeletal and paleogenomic analysis of prehistoric stature variation suggests relatively reduced health for early European farmers. Who’d be a farmer, though, eh? But then they didn’t get payments for ecosystem services, nor gene-edited seaweeds.
Nibbles: Apple conservation & breeding, Seychelles coconut, Serow, Restoration, Seeds InService, Banana collecting, Oz glasshouse, Soltis video
- Citizen science to conserve apples.
- Citizen science to breed apples.
- Citizen science to conserve the coco de mer.
- Conserving a goat-antelope in Sumatra. Maybe try citizen science?
- Sourcing seeds for reforestation is tough. Maybe try citizen science?
- Art to conserve seeds.
- Scientists get help from citizens to collect improbable bananas of PNG.
- Australian genebank gets a biosafety facility. Paid for by citizens.
- The legendary Pamela Soltis on polyploidy. She’s a citizen too.
Brainfood: Post 2020, Dietary diversity, African greens, Pollinator diversity, Seed science, Seed systems, Sorghum landraces, Wild millet, Maize microbiome, AnGR, Yosemite apples
- Actions on sustainable food production and consumption for the post-2020 global biodiversity framework. Subsidy reform, valuation, food waste reduction, sustainability standards, life cycle assessments, sustainable diets, mainstreaming biodiversity and strengthening governance. Easy, then, I guess.
- Farming System for Nutrition-a pathway to dietary diversity: Evidence from India. Well at least mainstreaming biodiversity is very easy, it seems.
- Unpacking the value of traditional African vegetables for food and nutrition security. Not so fast. African leafy greens have come a long way, but there’s still a bit of mainstreaming to go.
- Wild insect diversity increases inter-annual stability in global crop pollinator communities. Mainstreaming biodiversity should include pollinators.
- First the seed: Genomic advances in seed science for improved crop productivity and food security. Yeah, but it starts with seeds.
- Pluralistic Seed System Development: A Path to Seed Security? Though sometimes the seeds don’t get to who needs them.
- Farmers’ Perception about the Use of Sorghum (Sorghum bicolor (L.) Moench) Landraces and Their Genetic Erosion in South Wollo Administrative Zone, Ethiopia. Sorghum landraces could do with some mainstreaming. Maybe pluralistic seed systems would help.
- Phenotypic variation and adaptation in morphology and salt spray tolerance in coastal and inland populations of Setaria viridis in central Japan. Mainstreaming diversity in a crop may involve protecting the habitats of its wild relatives.
- Maize germplasm chronosequence shows crop breeding history impacts recruitment of the rhizosphere microbiome. And not in a good way. Looks like mainstreaming biodiversity should also include the root microbiome.
- Farm animal genetic resources and the COVID-19 pandemic. Agroecology is the high road to mainstreaming farm animal biodiversity.
- Genetic data inform Yosemite National Park’s apple orchard management guidelines. Mainstreaming biodiversity in action.
Brainfood: DSI, SMTA, Geno-Phenotyping, Adoption ceiling, Vegetable seeds, Neutral diversity, Trait variation, Feed interventions, Polyploidy, Varietal selection, Sugarcane genomes, African supply chains, Farmers Rights, Agroforestry
- Bringing access and benefit sharing into the digital age. One thing needed: a Multi‐stakeholder Committee on the Governance of Digital Sequence Information. Well that was easy.
- A contract‐law analyses of the SMTA of the Plant Treaty: Can it work as a binding contract? Three things: the SMTA needs to be valid, binding and enforceable. Which it isn’t now, apparently.
- Recent Large-Scale Genotyping and Phenotyping of Plant Genetic Resources of Vegetatively Propagated Crops. Five things: standardized SSR loci, GBS-derived SNPs, SNP arrays, high-throughput phenotyping system, GWAS.
- “Breaking through the 40% adoption ceiling: Mind the seed system gaps.” A perspective on seed systems research for development in One CGIAR. Four things: capture the demand characteristics of farmers, identify effective seed delivery pathways, ensure seed health and stopping the spread of disease, effective policies and regulation. I guess this is where the Toolkit comes in.
- Africa’s evolving vegetable seed sector: status, policy options and lessons from Asia. Four things: technical capacity, regulations, extension, marketing. Well, yeah.
- The inflated significance of neutral genetic diversity in conservation genetics. Three things: functional genetic diversity, demographic history, and ecological relationships.
- Intraspecific trait variation in plants: a renewed focus on its role in ecological processes. Three things: report individual replicates and population means, investigate mechanisms that affect ITVs, studies that span sub-disciplines (see paper above).
- A scoping review of feed interventions and livelihoods of small-scale livestock keepers. Three things: consider absorptive capacity of livestock keepers and extensionists, focus on semi-commercial sector, consider resource requirements of feed options. It’s all in the podcast. Remarkable similarity with the vegetables thing above, eh?
- Induced Polyploidy: A Tool for Forage Species Improvement. Two things. Thanks, colchicine.
- Varietal selection in marginal agroecological niches and cultural landscapes: the case of rice in the Togo Hills. Three things: participation, low-input conditions, landraces.
- Three founding ancestral genomes involved in the origin of sugarcane. A, B and C.
- “Essential non‐essentials”: COVID‐19 policy missteps in Nigeria rooted in persistent myths about African food supply chains. Five things: imports are not central to food security, rural families buy a lot of food, small farmers access markets after all, small & medium enterprises are hidden but not missing, domestic distribution is important.
- What Should Farmers’ Rights Look Like? The Possible Substance of a Right. 64 things.
- The one hundred tree species prioritized for planting in the tropics and subtropics as indicated by database mining. Bingo!
Nibbles: Pastoralism, Chinese seeds, Livestock genetics comic
- What pastoralists know.
- What a Chinese organic farmer knows.
- What kids should know.