- 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.
Nibbles: Dog origins, Dutch wheat trials, Chinese agricultural origins, Grass endophytes
- This origin-of-dogs saga is getting tedious. Figure it out, already.
- Dutch wheat varieties still improving.
- Chinese ate wild grasses for 20,000 years before domesticating crops.
- Fungal endophyte helps tall fescue cope with drought and high temperatures, but some fungal genotypes more than others. And some do it without producing livestock toxins.
Nibbles: CC & death, GBIF enhancements, Killer fungi, Lion trees, Old oaks, Gourmet ganja, Wild horses, Resistant cassava, Contested agronomy, p-values
- 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.”
Brainfood: Chinese royal jelly, Diverse wine yeasts, Heirloom values, Oil and biodiversity, Grassland management, Maize and culture, Minimum viable populations, Good coffee
- High Royal Jelly-Producing Honeybees (Apis mellifera ligustica) (Hymenoptera: Apidae) in China. China supplies 90% of the global market?
- Taking Advantage of Natural Biodiversity for Wine Making: The WILDWINE Project. Back to the future, via yeast diversity.
- Conservation of Landrace: The Key Role of the Value for Agrobiodiversity Conservation. An Application on Ancient Tomatoes Varieties. Fancy maths shows farmer maintaining heirloom tomato variety in Perugia could be charging more.
- Are changes in global oil production influencing the rate of deforestation and biodiversity loss? Less oil production, more agricultural expansion, more biodiversity loss.
- Grazing vs. mowing: A meta-analysis of biodiversity benefits for grassland management. Grazing. Probably. The data sucks.
- Maize diversity associated with social origin and environmental variation in Southern Mexico. Ethnicity trumps altitude in genetic patterning. Morphology is all over the place.
- Genetics in conservation management: Revised recommendations for the 50/500 rules, Red List criteria and population viability analyses. One we missed. 100/1000 is the new 50/500. Multiply by 10 for census population sizes to avoid inbreeding and retain evolutionary potential, respectively.
- Advances in genomics for the improvement of quality in Coffee. We’ll need to sequence the wild species too.
Brainfood: Cajanus breeding, Saline rice, Temperate perennial fodder, Andean beans, Seed microbes
- Pigeonpea breeding in eastern and southern Africa: challenges and opportunities. No longer orphan, but then again not exactly adopted yet.
- Genetic diversity in the rice landraces (Oryza sativa L.) of coastal Sundarbans (India) and their adaptation to the local saline condition investigated both at molecular and physiological level. Out of 50 landraces, three have salinity tolerance genes that have not already been used.
- Review of shrubs and trees in intensive ruminant systems in temperate areas. Promising, but not as common or easy as you might think.
- A Phaseolus vulgaris Diversity Panel for Andean Bean Improvement. Andean diversity assessed for Africa.
- Developmental Peculiarities and Seed-Borne Endophytes in Quinoa: Omnipresent, Robust Bacilli Contribute to Plant Fitness. Next step, try them on other crops. What could possibly go wrong?