Medicinal plants

April 20, 2014April 20, 2014

Special Brainfood Extra: Economic Botany, Volume 68, Number 1

A whole issue of a journal given the Brainfood treatment. Because I’ve got allergies and can’t go out and it’s a holiday and I’m bored. Think of it as an Easter egg. Unnecessary, but tasty.

Are Ecologically Important Tree Species the Most Useful? A Case Study from Indigenous People in the Bolivian Amazon. Among medicinal and edible species, the most used are not the ones that most strike you as you walk around. Unlike the case for species used in construction and crafts.
The Electronic Trade in Greek Endemic Plants: Biodiversity, Commercial and Legal Aspects. Seemingly profitable, but possibly largely illegal. And I’m willing to bet that the ones that are most traded are the ones that are most difficult to find.
Medicinal Plant Trade in Sierra Leone: Threats and Opportunities for Conservation. No internet involved, but still profitable. For how long? I guess that depends on how easy they are to find, and harvest sustainably.
Structure and Floristic Composition of Forest Management Systems Associated with the Edible Fruit Tree Oecopetalum mexicanum in the Sierra de Misantla, Veracruz, Mexico. You can manage a landscape to favour a particular, strikingly important species, and also promote diversity.
Contemporary Gathering Practice and Antioxidant Benefit of Wild Seaweeds in Hawai’i. No word on whether the most obvious ones are are the ones that are most used, but I gotta believe that they are.
The Food System during the Formative Period in West Mesoamerica. Advent of ceramics may have had an important effect on crops and food.
Fuelling the Ancient Maya Salt Industry. Not to mention on their seasoning.
Identification of Cannabis Fiber from the Astana Cemeteries, Xinjiang, China, with Reference to Its Unique Decorative Utilization. Used to make the tails on horse figurines. No word on further, ahem, ritual uses.
Big Messages in Small Details: Nature in Roman Archaeology. Even the small details of the natural world on the Ara Pacis have meaning. Like the horses’ tails?

April 13, 2014April 13, 2014

Nibbles: Diverse diets, Ancient diets, Urban veggies, Medicinal phylogenetics, Double blind cowpeas, Adaptation hope, Livestock emissions, Climate change data, Afghani poppies, Aussie ag & breeders, Chinese agrobiodiversity, Weird cherry

Meaty presentation on how biodiversity in the food system delivers a diverse diet. Could hardly fail to, really, could it.
What’s a diverse diet ever done for me, asks ancient farmer.
Vegetables an important part of diverse diets, of course. Especially in urban areas.
Interesting EU project on the phylogenetics of medicinal plants. Any vegetables in there?
Improved cowpeas only improved when farmers know they are improved. Wow.
Some glimmers of hope on adaptation? Maybe.
Not all livestock bad for climate change. And room for improvement on those that are.
Yeah, but who cares, global warming is just a giant natural fluctuation, no? No.
Legalize it, already! Poppy cultivation as a climate change adaptation measure?
Australian agriculture unprepared for climate change? With all these fancy breeders and access to the world’s genebanks?
Meanwhile, in China, the focus is on food sovereignty.
And in Japan on its spaced out cherry tree.

March 23, 2014March 23, 2014

Nibbles: Genebanks trifecta, Marley Coffee, Sorghum noodles, Biofortification Q&A, African oils, Cow diversity, Coffee course, Fructose deconstructed, Vanuatu chocolate, Candy bar phylogenies, Japanese copycats, Charger beer

CIP’s genebank in the limelight.
Egypt’s genebank in the limelight.
Australia’s genebank in the limelight. Limelight fast running out…
Ah, but genebanks not the only ones with cool videos: farmers in the limelight.
Yeah, it’s not just about the genebanks. Markets can help, I suppose. Especially if you have a famous name.
As with coffee, so with sorghum. Biofortified or not. All we need now is an agribusiness incubator, and here it is, courtesy of ICRISAT. But what will Japanese farmers think?
Same again for assorted African oils?
The diversity of cows has been driven by markets too.
Coffee 101 at UCDavis. Maybe they’ll invite Mr Marley to teach.
You want fructose in that coffee? No, probably not.
Maybe you prefer chocolate. From Vanuatu, natch. Looks like high quality stuff too, but even crap chocolate has its uses, like teaching taxonomy for instance.
No, you’re more a Japanese bourbon person, aren’t you? Wait, do you need barley for that? I’m sure those young Japanese farmers will be all over this.

February 26, 2014February 26, 2014

Nibbles: Foley Heinz award, C4 rice history, Fish feeding Africa, Sustainable harvesting, Sorghum death, Carver, Improving crops, Commodity production

Jonathan Foley, @GlobalEcoGuy, lands well deserved award for his straight-talking on food issues.
I wonder what he’d say about C4 rice.
Not sure he’s ever written about fish, but he probably will.
Sustainable harvesting of Prunus africana maybe not so sustainable after all. Well, I guess that’s science.
Encomium to the recently-deceased “Father of Sorghum.”
Shame he missed the round-up on improving abiotic stress tolerance in crops, linked to by AoB Blog.
Wouldn’t it have been cool if the Father of Sorghum had met the Peanut Man?
Global production of 10 top commodities has increased 130% since 1960, population by 89%. Draw your own conclusions about world hunger and malnutrition.

February 10, 2014April 22, 2014

Brainfood: Genomics trifecta, Ex/in situ, Oat disease resistance, Drying beads, Biodiversity assessment, Maize models, Trees & nutrition, NTFP, Fortification

Maintaining Food Value of Wild Rice (Zizania palustris L.) Using Comparative Genomics. Cultivated cultivated rice assists in the breeding of cultivated wild rice. If you see what I mean.
Mining the Genus Solanum for Increasing Disease Resistance. The key is distinguishing the alleles from the paralogs.
Genetic Dissection of Aluminium Tolerance in the Triticeae. And the trifecta from the Genomics of Plant Genetic Resources book. Rye has most, barley least, and we know how they do it.
Dual Threats of Imperiled Native Agroecosystems and Climate Change to World Food Security: Genomic Perspectives. Genebanks are necessary but not sufficient.
Identification of new sources of resistance to powdery mildew in oat. In the wild species, natch.
Optimum ratios of zeolite seed Drying Beads® to dry rice seeds for genebank storage. 1:1 by weight.
The Biodiversity Forecasting Toolkit: Answering the ‘how much’, ‘what’, and ‘where’ of planning for biodiversity persistence. Yeah, but will it work with agricultural biodiversity?
How do various maize crop models vary in their responses to climate change factors? Enough to make using an ensemble best, not enough to doubt that temperature will be the main factor affecting yields by the end of the century.
Dietary quality and tree cover in Africa. More trees, more dietary diversity, more fruit & veg consumption, though up to a point.
The importance of local forest benefits: Economic valuation of Non-Timber Forest Products in the Eastern Arc Mountains in Tanzania. $42 million a year, spread over 2000 households.
Fortification: new findings and implications. It’s worked in the US for some nutrients, but not for others, and in some case we don’t understand how and why. We know in other cases it is unlikely to work. Nutritionists have to work together with plant breeders. And, we would add, the agricultural sector in general.