- Halloween is an agricultural thing. Basically.
- Frederick the Great had a thing for potatoes. Among other things.
- CIP genebank manager on TV. He has a thing for potatoes too. As you can tell from his new website.
- Pop quiz: Can you find this N American potato in the CIP genebank?
- The extraordinary story of the ancient Native American crookneck watermelon. Bet it goes well with S. jamesii.
- Paul Gepts gets award. No word on his thoughts on potatoes, but he does like beans.
- Transhumance lives in the Caucasus.
- What in tarnation is a zubron?
- Making the case for climate action on agriculture at COP23. And vice versa.
Nibbles: Super-fruit, Wheat, CWR toolkit
- I’ve got your next five superfoods right here.
- Weakened wheats make grain go further.
- Everybody needs an interactive toolkit for crop wild relative conservation.
Brainfood: Rice introgression, African rice cores, Cereal domestication rates, Power vegetables, Biodiversity services, Afrikaner cattle diversity, Conservation funding
- Introgression from cultivated rice alters genetic structures of wild relative populations: implications for in situ conservation. Not totally wild any more.
- Genetic Variation and Population Structure of Oryza glaberrima and Development of a Mini-Core Collection Using DArTseq. 2,179 accessions, 5 geographic groups, 16% recover >95% of polymorphisms.
- Geographic mosaics and changing rates of cereal domestication. Applying fancy maths to archaeobotanical remains shows that selection pressures varied in time, and started slow.
- Tapping the economic and nutritional power of vegetables. Eat your veggies, damn it!
- To what extent can ecosystem services motivate protecting biodiversity? Not enough.
- Genetic diversity of Afrikaner cattle in southern Africa. 3 groups, but not geographically determined, and lots of diversity despite recent declines in numbers.
- Nominal 30-m Cropland Extent Map of Continental Africa by Integrating Pixel-Based and Object-Based Algorithms Using Sentinel-2 and Landsat-8 Data on Google Earth Engine. Next level. But when will be be able to distinguish crops?
- Reductions in global biodiversity loss predicted from conservation spending. But the impact of spending goes down with with increasing development pressure.
Brainfood: Yeast census, Kansas collections, Species abundance, Dietary diversity, Seed longevity, Tree conservation, Yam metabolomics, Ethiopian mustard shattering, Improving ITPGRFA
- Census of Yeasts Isolated from Natural Ecosystem and Conserved in Worldwide Collections. 27 countries, 41 collections, 58,095 strains.
- The Curiosity of Collections: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at What’s in the Drawers, Cabinets and Refrigerators of K-State Collections and Why It’s Important. Including the Wheat Genetics Resource Center.
- Species are not most abundant in the centre of their geographic range or climatic niche. Even trees.
- Tartary Buckwheat Genetic Diversity in the Himalayas Associated with Farmer Landrace Diversity and Low Dietary Dependence. Relying on fewer food crops is bad for crop genetic diversity.
- Contrasting tocol ratios associated with seed longevity in rice variety groups. It’s the relative amounts of different homologues, not the total.
- Gene conservation of tree species — Banking on the future. Proceedings of a workshop. USA-centred, but lessons more generally applicable.
- Deep Learning for Multi-task Plant Phenotyping. Computer can count wheat spikes and spikelets.
- Metabolite profiling of yam (Dioscorea spp.) accessions for use in crop improvement programmes. 200 compounds on 49 accessions in 4 species. But now what?
- Molecular diversity analysis and genetic mapping of pod shatter resistance loci in Brassica carinata L. 5 QTLs for shatter resistance found in Australian collection. In other news, there’s an Australian collection of Ethiopian mustard.
- Access without benefit-sharing: Design, effectiveness and reform of the FAO Seed Treaty. Hybrid SMTA/subscription model, gradual Annex I expansion, successively improving domestic implementation.
Nibbles: Coffee nomenclature, Sardinian pasta, Kernza, Wheat landraces, Roman sauce, Czech potato, Yeast et al, Agricultural biodiversity, Apple seedlings
- Coffee: variety or varietal?
- Malloreddus: from Campideno or Campidano?
- Wheat: annual or perennial?
- Landrace conference: to go or not to go?
- Garum: to be or not to be?
- Potato: but blue?
- Microbial collections: to charge or not to charge?
- Agrobiodiversity: use it or lose it?
- Apples: but seedlings?