- Dr Sandy Knapp on botanical monographs. Solanum, of course.
- Dr Joukje Buiteveld on fruit field genebanks in the Netherlands.
- NordGen adopts GRIN-Global.
- Hybrid pigeonpa in the Indian news.
- All the tea in India. And Ireland?
- The rise of craft chocolate.
- And here’s the beverage trifecta: coffee in Ethiopia.
- Seed collecting in Brazil for reforestation.
- NBPGR does medicinals.
- You wanna be a “germplasm acquisition coordinator“? I bet you do. But watch out…
- Podcast on cattle domestication. Dr Hans Lenstra from Utrecht University in the hot seat.
Nibbles: Seawater, NUS, Biodiversity Targets and Finance, Genebanks, Pipes
- Seawater is the next water.
- EMBRAPA’s booklets on “unconventional” vegetables.
- Money should put its money where its money is.
- Kids make genebank.
- Malta makes genebank.
- Native Americans used to smoke unusual tobacco species, and non-tobacco species too for that matter.
Nibbles: High edition
- South Africa looks to legalize weed.
- Quick gallop through the chemistry of food. Weed brownies not covered.
- Is your salad this diverse? Weed not included.
Nibbles: Mexico CC, Europe CC, Andean CC, CSA, Seeds, GIAHS, China genebank, Maize domestication, Coffee history, Conservation book
- Interactive website on bioclimatic corridors in Mexico. Bits don’t work, though.
- Interactive website on climate analogues for Europe.
- How Andean farmers are coping with the kind of changes mapped above.
- Oh dear, climate smart agriculture is a myth anyway.
- But saving seeds isn’t, thankfully.
- Still not enough linkage with the GIAHS, though, but maybe this course will fix that.
- Maybe start with peafowl? China shows us how.
- How maize became a staple: quite early, and quite quickly, basically.
- Not much coffee in early English coffeehouses. Amsterdam’s coffeeshops unavailable for comment.
- Open-access magnum opus: Conservation Research, Policy and Practice.
Brainfood: CC & breeding, Maize data, Images, Seed activism, Fishy rice, BRI, Cherry genome, Llama diversity, Swiss chestnuts, Integrated livestock, Aichi targets, Forests, Rejolladas, Bitter gourd genome
- Designing crops for adaptation to the drought and high‐temperature risks anticipated in future climates. High-temperature tolerance of seed-setting and transpiration efficiency are going to be needed.
- 2019 release of SNP allele frequency data for maize accessions in the CIMMYT Germplasm Bank maize collection. Maybe this will help?
- ImageBreed: Open‐access plant breeding web–database for image‐based phenotyping. I’m sure this will help.
- In or out? Organisational dynamics within European ‘peasant seed’ movements facing opening-up institutions and policies. In, I hope.
- Rice field fisheries: Wild aquatic species diversity, food provision services and contribution to inland fisheries. Careful with intensification.
- A draft genome of sweet cherry (Prunus avium L.) reveals genome‐wide and local effects of domestication. Interesting parallels with peach.
- Genetic Diversity and Population Structure of Llamas (Lama glama) from the Camelid Germplasm Bank—Quimsachata. The populations of 2 breeds in the bank are diverse but not very different.
- Reservoir of the European chestnut diversity in Switzerland. There’s a uniquely Swiss genetic group.
- Commercial integrated crop-livestock systems achieve comparable crop yields to specialized production systems: A meta-analysis. Aim for soils of intermediate texture for the win-win though.
- Best-practice biodiversity safeguards for Belt and Road Initiative’s financiers. Needs work.
- Assessment of national-level progress towards elements of the Aichi Biodiversity Targets. Not great. See above.
- Meeting the food security challenge for nine billion people in 2050: What impact on forests? Impact need not be as great as it could be. See above.
- Influential landscapes: Temporal trends in the agricultural use of rejolladas at Tahcabo, Yucatán, Mexico. Solution sinkholes have been used for horticulture for hundreds of years.
- Long-read bitter gourd (Momordica charantia) genome and the genomic architecture of nonclassic domestication. Almost as much phenotypic differences between two regional genotypic groups among cultivated forms than between the wild and cultivated. More here.