- The genomic origin of early maize in eastern North America. There were at least 2 eastern dispersals of ancient maize from the US Southwest.
- Archaeological findings show the extent of primitive characteristics of maize in South America. At about the same time, semi-domesticated maize also reached deep into South America.
- Maize monoculture supported pre-Columbian urbanism in southwestern Amazonia. Including the Llanos de Moxos in Bolivia, where it supported cities.
- Millets, dogs, pigs and permanent settlement: productivity transitions in Neolithic northern China. In China, it was millet that supported cities. Well, and pigs.
- Species identification of silks by protein mass spectrometry reveals evidence of wild silk use in antiquity. People in those cities had to wear fancy silken clothes, right?
- Ancient genomics and the origin, dispersal, and development of domestic sheep. Sheep domestication started in Anatolia, but that wasn’t the end of it, because there was an influx of diversity from the steppes in the Bronze Age. Nice parallel with human diversity. Different to the Chinese millet-pig story though.
- Unveiling the culinary tradition of ‘focaccia’ in Late Neolithic Mesopotamia by way of the integration of use-wear, phytolith & organic-residue analyses. You can trace focaccia way back. Goes quite nicely with roast sheep, I suspect.
- Different strategies in Indus agriculture: the goals and outcomes of farming choices. Even ancient cultures sometimes felt the need to diversify.
Brainfood: Food systems, Micronutrients, Animal-source foods, Dietary diversity, Opportunity crops, Traditional landscapes, Gastronomic landscapes, Opportunity crops, Biofortification, Fermentation
- Global and local perspectives on food security and food systems. Six experts have their say on how to transform food systems, and dietary diversity seems to be a common (though not a universal) theme. Let’s dig a little deeper into that.
- Global estimation of dietary micronutrient inadequacies: a modelling analysis. A lot of people could probably do with eating more fruits and vegetables, for example.
- Plant-based diets–impacts of consumption of little or no animal-source foods on human health. Some people could probably do with eating more animal-source foods, though. Well, that’s diversity too.
- The association between crop diversity and children’s dietary diversity: multi-scalar and cross-national comparisons. In some places, growing more diverse crops is associated with eating more diverse diets; in other places, not so much. Damn you, nuance!
- Revive and Thrive: Forgotten Crops for Resilient Food Systems. Fortunately, there are more advantages to growing more diverse crops than its possible positive effect on diet diversity…
- Why traditional rural landscapes are still important to our future. …yes indeed there are, especially if they are grown in diverse landscapes.
- Nurturing gastronomic landscapes for biosphere stewardship. The hallowed craft of cooking can help realize those advantages.
- NUS so fast: the social and ecological implications of a rapidly developing indigenous food economy in the Cape Town area. However, growing more diverse crops can have downsides, celebrity chefs etc. notwithstanding.
- Assessing realized genetic gains in biofortified cassava breeding for over a decade: Enhanced nutritional value and agronomic performance. Breeding crops for higher nutritional value comes at a yield price. Which presumably, in some places, for some people, may be worth paying, give all the uncertainties above?
- The future is fermented: Microbial biodiversity of fermented foods is a critical resource for food innovation and human health. Or, we could all ferment more. And maybe get drunk.
Nibbles: IUCN report, Land Institute, Climate smart beer, BioLeft seeds, Cryo coral
- Big IUCN report says that biodiversity and agriculture are in conflict, they don’t really need to be, but it’s really complicated for them not to be. So that’s us all told.
- If only annual crops were perennial, for example, eh?
- If only we incorporated more sustainable agriculture in education, for example, eh? Apart from anything else we could still have beer. No word on the role of perennial barley though.
- If only improved seeds were open source, for example, eh?
- If only we could cryopreserve coral, for example, eh? Wait, what?
Brainfood: Diverse ecologists, Wild vs cultivated, Ecosystem services, Indigenous people, Mixtures, On-farm trees, Monitoring protected areas, Social media & protected areas, Wild harvesting, Land sparing vs sharing, Agroecology & plant health, Wild vs cultivated
- On the importance of diversity in ecological research. Diversity of the research teams, that is. This should apply to everything that follows.
- Adapting wild biodiversity conservation approaches to conserve agrobiodiversity. The main gap seem to be in the area of “payment for system services.” Agrobiodiversity could learn from biodiversity there.
- The Role of Crop, Livestock, and Farmed Aquatic Intraspecific Diversity in Maintaining Ecosystem Services. And there’s a lot to pay for, apparently.
- No basis for claim that 80% of biodiversity is found in Indigenous territories. There are better numbers for the undoubted (but alas still unrewarded) importance of Indigenous people for biodiversity conservation.
- Plant diversity decreases greenhouse gas emissions by increasing soil and plant carbon storage in terrestrial ecosystems. Huge meta-analysis says plant mixtures are better than monocultures for C storage. Maybe someone should pay for that?
- Food-sourcing from on-farm trees mediates positive relationships between tree cover and dietary quality in Malawi. And some of those trees will be wild.
- Delivering Systematic and Repeatable Area-Based Conservation Assessments: From Global to Local Scales. Actually, the Digital Observatory for Protected Areas (DOPA) could also usefully be applied to agricultural biodiversity.
- Applying deep learning on social media to investigate cultural ecosystem services in protected areas worldwide. Well, of course, it was only a matter of time. And the above comment also applies.
- Does long-term harvesting impact genetic diversity and population genetic structure? A study of Indian gooseberry (Phyllanthus emblica) in the Central Western Ghats region in India. AI will only get you so far. But it would be interesting to see if AI could have predicted these results. More training dataset needed, I suspect.
- Agrobiodiversity conservation enables sustainable and equitable land sparing. Intensifying agriculture can be good for land sparing, but its sustainability depends on land sharing. Nice way to escape the dichotomy.
- Towards an agroecological approach to crop health: reducing pest incidence through synergies between plant diversity and soil microbial ecology. I guess this is an example of the above.
- Are agricultural commodity production systems at risk from local biodiversity loss? Have you not been listening?
Brainfood: Yield gap, Domestication & breeding, TEK, Breeding gourds, Breeding pearl millet, Breeding peas, Banana seed systems, Breeding bees
- Global spatially explicit yield gap time trends reveal regions at risk of future crop yield stagnation. For 8 of 10 major crops, yield gaps have widened steadily from 1975 to 2010 over most areas, and remained static for sugar cane and oil palm. Time to turbo-charge the breeding?
- Domestication and the evolution of crops: variable syndromes, complex genetic architectures, and ecological entanglements. If you want to turbo-charge breeding, you need to understand (among other things) the ecological context of domestication.
- Including Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) in Agricultural Research: Guidelines and Lessons Learned. I suspect Traditional Ecological Knowledge can help with figuring out the ecological context of domestication.
- High levels of genetic variation and differentiation in wild tropical gourds provide a novel resource for cucurbit crop improvement. Ok, but ecological knowledge would like a word.
- Understanding genetic diversity in drought-adaptive hybrid parental lines in pearl millet. Any link to ecology of original collecting sites, I wonder?
- Genetic Diversity and Population Structure Analysis of a Diverse Panel of Pea (Pisum sativum). Again, ecological knowledge conspicuous by its absence. Maybe the passport data just weren’t up to it?
- Banana seed exchange networks in Burundi – Linking formal and informal systems. Yes, yes, it’s not just about the breeding, the seed system also has to work.
- Editorial: Current status of honey bee genetic and breeding programs: progress and perspectives. Pollinators need breeding programmes too.