- Breadfruit diversity makes for year round nutrition.
- Bacteria help potatoes fight off bacteria.
- India calls for efforts to conserve indigenous livestock. What’s stopping them?
- All you ever wanted to know about Satoyama — including Satoumi!
- Speaking of which … landscape genetics. No, I don’t know either.
Nibbles: Musa wild relative, Soil biodiversity, Wild sorghum hybrids, Millet diversity, Bees, Garlic core collection, Heirloom seed saving, Nutrition, Fungal conservation, Sacred places
- New(ish) banana wild relative found in Mekong. Photo by Markku Hakkinen.
- Conserving soil biodiversity.
- Ecological fitness of wild-cultivated sorghum hybrids equal to wild parent.
- Pattern of genetic diversity in pearl millet determined by artificial, not natural, selection.
- The latest on the troubles of bees.
- Garlic gets cored. Totally SFW.
- Seed saving in the Hudson Valley.
- West African leaders say agriculture should be about nutrition. As opposed to?
- International Society for Fungal Conservation established. And that’s about it for now, but there are some ideas about what it will do.
Nibbles: CBD, Agroforestry, Rice, Soil interactions, Bumblebees, Chaco, Geoparks
- Executive Director of CBD perpetuates myth that we have lost 75% of crop diversity, at high-level meeting, no less.
- 670 agroforestry trees in a database, courtesy of ICRAF.
- Last Rice Today of this year, the 50th anniversary of the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI), summarized.
- Soil community helps maintain species and genetic diversity.
- Good news for some UK bumblebees.
- On the agricultural frontier in South America. Any crop wild relatives there?
- Global Network of National Geoparks expands. Any crop wild relatives there?
Europe maps its soil biodiversity
The Land Management & Natural Hazards Unit of the EU’s Joint Research Centre has just announced the publication of a European Atlas of Soil Biodiversity. Here’s the map showing where soil biodiversity is most at risk.
This is part of JRC’s European Soil Database, which complements similar soil mapping projects for other parts of the world. Grist to the FIGS mill. Here, for example, is the map of saline soils in Europe. Seems like Spain and Hungary may be the places to go if you’re looking for salt-tolerance in crop wild relatives.
Meanwhile, in England they’re worried about how effective their protected areas are at, well, protecting biodiversity, though I’m not sure to what extent that includes the soil kind. And since we’re on the subject of maps, here’s one of the protected area network of England (Tier 1 is the highest level of protection).
We’ve noted here before how our friend Nigel Maxted and his co-workers at the University of Birmingham are working to have crop wild relatives included in the thinking about protected areas in the UK. We know from their research that in fact many important crop wild relatives fall outside the protected area network altogether. It would be interesting to know to what extent these species were considered in the review of the effectiveness of the system.
Avant garde fungi
Ok, so who knew that John Cage was also “an avid mycologist, collector and consumer of mushrooms“?