- Plant Health, Animal Health, Human Health and Environmental Health. What’s not to like?
- It used to be thought that tobacco and sugar could help with the above. Go figure.
- La Cuna del Maíz Mexicano.
- The same, but for rice in Asia.
- Backyard seed saving, and science.
Nibbles: Kenya forests, Australian grasses, Jackfruit processing, Turin fruit museum
- Safeguarding Kenya’s forests the local way.
- The latest from the Dark Emu guy. Is this how Australian Aborigines farmed?
- Adding value to jackfruit in India.
- No jackfruit in this astonishing collection of fruit diversity in wax, alas.
Talking genebanks
Watch the recording on Facebook, if you can. And that’s hot on the heels of this discussion hosted by the Global Landscapes Forum.
Nibbles: Altitude coffee, Coffee audio, Grape breeding, Borlaug, Hunan genebank, Game of Thrones genetics
- Growing coffee at 2400m could be the new normal.
- A history of coffee rust, thanks to Prof. Stuart McCook and WCR. Not much of a problem at 2400m.
- Oh and here’s a podcast on the history of coffee, an interview with the author of Coffeeland: “drinking coffee is a symptom of working for other people.” Lot of that lately: In Our Time, Eat This Podcast.
- Breeding grapes the smart way. That just seems to mean have access to a germplasm collection and choose your parents carefully.
- Which is what Borlaug did. Ok, plus he was lucky.
- Hunan gets a genebank. Prosperity ensues.
- Could there have been a Green Revolution in Westeros? With that genetics?
Brainfood: Community seedbanks, Habitat conservation, Maize breeding, NWFP, Neolithic dairy, Straw, Double burden, Species protection, Salty rice, Barley landraces, Scicomm
- Do community seed banks contribute to the social-ecological resilience of communities? A case-study from Western Guatemala. Yes, but they have to move with the times.
- Reconciling global priorities for conserving biodiversity habitat. Only about 20% of high value habitat is protected.
- Genome-wide selection and genetic improvement during modern maize breeding. Breeding in the US and China converged.
- Non-wood forest products in Europe – A quantitative overview. Value of berries, mushrooms etc. amounts to almost three quarters of the value of the wood harvest, ten times the usually estimate.
- Latitudinal gradient in dairy production with the introduction of farming in Atlantic Europe. Was there a taboo against fish?
- Recent Advances in Dual Purpose Rice and Wheat Research: a synthesis. It was worth focusing on straw in breeding, and still is.
- Mapping local patterns of childhood overweight and wasting in low- and middle-income countries between 2000 and 2017. Hotspots in Indonesia, Thailand, southeastern China, Botswana, Cameroon and central Nigeria. Surely dietary diversity could help in those places?
- Is there a peaceful cohabitation between human and natural habitats? Assessing global patterns of species loss. Yes, there is, in very poor and very rich places. Would be interesting to mash up with the above.
- Back to the Wild: On a Quest for Donors Toward Salinity Tolerant Rice. Need to move beyond rufipogon.
- Insights into phylogeny, age and evolution of Allium (Amaryllidaceae) based on the whole plastome sequences. Monophyletic, amazingly, with 3 evolutionary lineages.
- Barley Landraces: Ecological heritage for edaphic stress adaptations and sustainable production. Use landraces as recipients, rather than donors. Before it’s too late.
- Ten simple rules for innovative dissemination of research. More in the breach, I suspect…