Medicinal plants

Nibbles: Coffee taxonomy, Agarwood trade, Apios promotion, Dog species concept, Seed collecting, Kudzu control, ICARDA chickpeas, Ancient maize beer, Quinoa landscapes, History of domestication, Breeding mistakes, EU breeding value, Priming, Wild flower ecotypes, Vitellaria use

Coffee botany resources.
Uncovering the illegal agarwood trade.
Developing the potato bean. First step: find a new name.
Dog taxonomy explained.
Project Baseline sets a, ahem, baseline, for studying plant diversity under climate change.
Ok, random shout-out for my niece Francesca’s work on kudzu bug natural control. Because I can. And she’s fabulous.
Blooming chickpeas!
The inhabitants of Casas Grandes brewed maize beer in the 14th century. Well of course they did.
Peruvian quinoa landscapes have a name: aynokas.
Crop domestication 101.
Where (commercial) breeders go wrong.
Presumably none of above mistakes are made by EU plant breeding companies.
Stimulating plant defences for faster response to pest and disease attack.
Germany told to go for local meadow seeds.
Use of shea butter trees goes way back.

Climate change is going to hit us where we live. Or die.
How to make GBIF more relevant for agrobiodiversity: a 10-point plan.
Killer fungi on the loose? ‘Twas ever thus. But genomics will save us?
Planting trees is good for lions too.
There are still medieval oaks in England.
“…where sommelier-like ‘budtenders’ sell gourmet ganja in a designer showroom.”
Rewilding the wild horse.
More about the cassava variety Kasetsart 50, poster child for CGIAR impact.
It’s not just genetic resources that are contested. Yep, agronomy too.
“Scientific conclusions and business or policy decisions should not be based only on whether a p-value passes a specific threshold.”

The next step in the evolution of participatory plant breeding is evolutionary plant breeding.
1458 livestock breeds are in trouble.
A blast from corn’s past. In more ways than one, as this article from High Country News is kinda old.
The Chinese market in African wildlife is bad for both.
Let them eat plastic.
Maclura pomifera is apparently all the rage in Iowa.
There’s more to Italian wine than chianti.
“You can’t really get fucked up on kava.” I beg to differ.
Two independent pieces on the continuing evolution of humans to cope with their diet: starch, milk and meat.

BBC Food Programme on crop diversity in India, with a little help from Bioversity’s Stefano Padulosi (whose name manages to be pronounced in three different ways in 20 minutes.
How to measure photosynthesis on a grand scale.
The origins of our diet. It’s the interactions, stupid.
Barley as superfood. No, not the fermented kind.
More diverse freshwaters give higher fish yields.
European earthworm diversity mapped. No word on relationship with yields. Surprisingly difficult to see any correlation with agricultural intensification.
It’s been a bad time for livestock (and therefore people) in Mongolia and in Ethiopia.
Domesticating the wild mango that is not a mango but is almost as tasty.
The weird world of the pure caffeine trade.

Spinifex fibres for ultra-thin condoms, with indigenous approval.
Piper borbonense getting its 15 minutes.
Cook Islands shares taros with Samoa. Fingers crossed they’re TLB resistant.
A couple of videos you may only be able to get on Facebook, or at least I can’t find other sources: Ethiopian coffee ceremony, and INRA/CIRAD’s banana and yam collections in Guadeloupe.
Speaking of coffee, drink it while you can. And yes, it’s China’s fault.
The cucumber in England through the ages.
Gourmet maize in Oaxaca right now.
All kinds of gourmet food in Peru right now too.
Ok, ok, a Filipina chef on gourmet heirloom rice too.