- Altitudinal shifts of the native and introduced flora of California in the context of 20th-century warming. Introduced species are better at spreading upward than the native flora.
- Rewilding is the new Pandora’s box in conservation. Step away from the shiny new box.
- Threatened herbivorous insects maintained by long-term traditional management practices in semi-natural grasslands. Because they can’t compete with generalists better adapted to the new-fangled conditions.
- Agricultural landscape simplification reduces natural pest control: A quantitative synthesis. Aphid control 46% lower in simple landscapes with lots of cultivated land, compared to more diverse landscapes.
- Addressing future trade-offs between biodiversity and cropland expansion to improve food security. Expansion could really help with food security, also in importing countries, but is likely to occur in biodiversity hotspots, which means the devil will be in the spatial detail.
- Quantitative analysis of rutin content using silkworm genetic resources. Wait, silkworm powder?
- Genetic Diversity, Population Structure, and Formation of a Core Collection of 1197 Citrullus Accessions. Microsatellites detect differences between American and E. Asian ecotypes and select diverse subset of 130 accessions from Chinese collection.
- Open Source Foodways: Agricultural Commons and Participatory Art. Seeds as art.
- Implications of the Nagoya Protocol for Genome Resource Banks Composed of Biomaterials from Rare and Endangered Species. There are many, some of them unforeseen.
- Functional Resilience against Climate-Driven Extinctions – Comparing the Functional Diversity of European and North American Tree Floras. Loss of species diversity may be decoupled from loss of functional diversity.
Nibbles: Cover crops, Viet coconut, Water maps, Mao’s mango, Tudor bread, Belgian gardening, IRRI fingerprints, Stay green barley, Miniature donkey
- Uncovering cover crops, the NY Times way.
- Uncovering coconut cultivation in Vietnam, the Roland Bourdeix way.
- Where to expect water shortages, and irrigation. Crying for a mashup.
- When a mango is not just a mango.
- Bread, and much else, according to the Tudors.
- A Belgian plantsman is revolutionizing gardening. No, really.
- How genomics will revolutionize rice breeding. No, really.
- How to get deeper barley roots for drought tolerance? Look to sorghum.
- And today’s miniature livestock is…a donkey.
Promoting local varieties through fancy cooking
So, did everyone catch the common strand in a lot of Friday’s Nibbles? I’ll give you a couple more minutes to figure it out, so go and have another look…
Yep, it’s the use of local crops and varieties in gourmet cuisine. And by implication the role of high-end chefs and restaurants 1 in conserving them, for example maize landraces in Oaxaca, everything from potatoes to huacatay in Peru, heirloom rice in the Philippines, and, for added piquancy, wild pepper in Madagascar.
Interesting that a number of CGIAR centres are involved in this kind of work. Although CIP is not mentioned by name in the Peru article, they do have form. And the International Year of Pulses presents an opportunity that some at least are grabbing with both hands. Here’s hoping it’s all part of an ingenious system-wide strategy which will do something about pearl millet next. No, wait…
That’s some funny looking coffee
That apocalyptic video from Business Insider that we Nibbled earlier is silly in a number of ways, but someone should really have found better stock footage to illustrate small, family-run coffee farms.
Nibbles: Poleward migration, Pulse infographic, Vodka, Ancient horse DNA, Old fish, Certified cacao, On farm book, Coarse millets, Banana diversity, Pearl millet demo
- Species flying poleward.
- FAO unveils pulse infographic. No word on whether any are harvestable by machine.
- Potato farmer adds value the old-fashioned way.
- Talking of old, here’s a really old horse.
- And the oldest evidence of fermentation for food preservation. But you’ll need a strong stomach.
- KitKat is certified crap.
- How (and Why) Farmers Maintain Crop Diversity: The Book. Some reviews.
- And here’s a specific example from India.
- And here, courtesy of Bioversity’s Ann Tutwiler, is why farmers need some help sometimes.
- Oh and here’s another one. People visit ICRISAT genebank in Niger, see stuff they like.