- Global modeling of nature’s contributions to people. Declining where the need is greatest. And that’s not even taking CWR into account.
- Farmer’s Varieties in India – Factors affecting their preferential prevalence and the current status of their legal protection. Open-pollinated crops are missing out.
- The bracteatus pineapple genome and domestication of clonally propagated crops. Domestication and early improvement as the result of a single clonal propagation event.
- Transposons played a major role in the diversification between the closely related almond and peach genomes: Results from the almond genome sequence. Including the sweet kernel phenotype.
- Genome-wide association mapping of date palm fruit traits. Fruit color and sugar composition changed in parallel.
- Genetic diversity and population structure of the Mediterranean sesame core collection with use of genome-wide SNPs developed by double digest RAD-Seq. Three genetic groups, but not geographically based.
- Ongoing accumulation of plant diversity through habitat connectivity in an 18-year experiment. You need those corridors.
- Meta‐analysis of the differential effects of habitat fragmentation and degradation on plant genetic diversity. You really do.
- In search of alternative proteins: unlocking the potential of underutilized tropical legumes. Beyond soybeans. I always liked Bambara groundnut.
- A scalable scheme to implement data-driven agriculture for small-scale farmers. Fancy maths put to some good use in Colombia. But what if it tells you to grow more coca?
- The evolution of crops that do not need us anymore. They’re called weeds.
Brainfood: Neolithic dairy, Wheat phenology, Carob origin, Malawi diets, Maize evolution, Bean domestication, Human evolution & diets, Chickpea pre-breeding, Food trade, Scaling up conservation, Apple leaves, Winged bean nutrition, White clover pedigrees, Bushmeat
- Milk of ruminants in ceramic baby bottles from prehistoric child graves. Neolithic sippy cups. Cute.
- Heat and Drought Stress Advanced Global Wheat Harvest Timing from 1981–2014. 2.5 days per decade.
- A strong east–west Mediterranean divergence supports a new phylogeographic history of the carob tree (Ceratonia siliqua, Leguminosae) and multiple domestications from native populations. No evidence of an eastern refugium.
- Value chains to improve diets: Diagnostics to support intervention design in Malawi. You can modify existing social protection interventions to optimize diets (including increasing diet diversity) by enhancing public- and private-sector linkages.
- Contemporary evolution of maize landraces and their wild relatives influenced by gene flow with modern maize varieties. Landrace genetic diversity actually increased due to introgression from modern varieties.
- Ancient genomes reveal early Andean farmers selected common beans while preserving diversity. Because they applied weak selection. Can breeders learn from this? Also, is it similar for maize?
- Reconstruction of nine thousand years of agriculture-based diet and impact on human genetic diversity in Asia. Changes in diet through domestication and processing have left signatures on the human genome.
- Transgressive segregations for agronomic improvement using interspecific crosses between C. arietinum L. x C. reticulatum Ladiz. and C. arietinum L. x C. echinospermum Davis species. For things like pod number, earliness and tolerance to cold.
- Linking global crop and livestock consumption to local production hotspots. China is the largest consumer of primary crops, and the third largest consumer of livestock. The Corn Belt, cerrado, Europe and E. China feeds it, and the world.
- How conservation initiatives go to scale. With great difficulty.
- Morphometrics Reveals Complex and Heritable Apple Leaf Shapes. It’s mainly about aspect ratio.
- Nutrient and Antinutrient Composition of Winged Bean (Psophocarpus tetragonolobus (L.) DC.) Seeds and Tubers. The best, and worst, among 50 accessions. Spoiler alert: it depends on the nutrient, and on whether you prefer the seeds or tubers.
- Identification of Founding Accessions and Patterns of Relatedness and Inbreeding Derived from Historical Pedigree Data in a White Clover Germplasm Collection in New Zealand. 15,000 accessions trace to about 175 founders.
- Poverty not taste drives the consumption of protected species in Madagascar. Let them eat domestic livestock meat.
Nibbles: Diversification, Watermelon lecture, Global productivity gaps, Kenyan CWR, Indian rice diversity, Native American seeds, Cool newsletters
- Value chains for baskets of products to diversify production and consumption.
- Video lecture on watermelon domestication.
- “…global agricultural productivity needs to increase at an average annual rate of 1.73 percent to sustainably produce food, feed, fiber, and bioenergy for 10 billion people in 2050.
- Maybe crop wild relatives can help? Kenyan media thinks so. This is the project in question, though you wouldn’t know it from the article.
- Somewhat one-sided account of ex situ rice conservation in India. People are looking into some of the claims…
- The Native American Seeds Protection Act of 2019 explained. Fingers crossed.
- Latest newsletters: the European PGRFA network & Genesys.
Brainfood: Diversification, Wheat genomics, Historical tom, Crop mapping, African crops & CC, Trans CWR, Fish nutrition, Seed storage, Indian rice, Food Neighbourhoods, Diet sustainability, Onion evaluation, Aussie wild rice, Rice evaluation
- To diversify or not to diversify, that is the question. Pursuing agricultural development for smallholder farmers in marginal areas of Ghana. Diversify.
- Improving grain yield, stress resilience and quality of bread wheat using large-scale genomics. A genotype –> phenotype map at last. I guess that means breeders are superfluous.
- The earliest recorded tomato in Britain, in Wales. In 1590, no less.
- Biotechnology of the sweetpotato: ensuring global food and nutrition security in the face of climate change. A whole special issue. Our troubles are over.
- Probabilistic global maps of crop-specific areas from 1961 to 2014. A new, different, cooler algorithm provides somewhat different results to older, less cool algorithms.
- Potential adaptive strategies for 29 sub-Saharan crops under future climate change. Climatic conditions not currently experienced by these crops will spread, but CWRs and diversity from outside Africa might help.
- Trans Situ Conservation of Crop Wild Relatives. Just means properly integrated in and ex situ.
- Criar y Dejarse Criar: Trans-Situ Crop Conservation and Indigenous Landscape Management through a Network of Global Food Neighborhoods. See what it means? Scaling up the Parque de la Papa.
- Harnessing global fisheries to tackle micronutrient deficiencies. Small fish from the tropics could be really good for nutrition in some countries. Namibia, I’m looking at you.
- Artificial seed aging reveals the invisible fraction: Implications for evolution experiments using the resurrection approach. Store your seeds properly.
- Status of Rice (Oryza sativa L.) Genepool Collected from Western Ghats Region of India: Gap Analysis and Diversity Distribution Mapping using GIS Tools. Out of 678 rice landraces from this region, 43 have been used in crop improvement.
- Advancing an Integrative Framework to Evaluate Sustainability in National Dietary Guidelines. In 32 sub-dimensions, no less. Important.
- Assembly and characterisation of a unique onion diversity set identifies resistance to Fusarium basal rot and improved seedling vigour. Group according to local daylength.
- Australian wild rice populations: a key resource for global food security. Because they’ve been isolated from the crop.
- Novel method for evaluation of anaerobic germination in rice and its application to diverse genetic collections. No word on whether it’s applicable to Aussie wild species, but I bet it is.
Brainfood: Traditional grazing, Land use & health, Local foods, Forage fish, OFSP, Olives & nematodes, Ohia seed, Mauka, Wolf erosion, American CWR, Open seeds, Global diseases, Neolithic LP, Rice in the US, Useful plants
- Traditional grazing systems in the Venetian Alps: Effects of grazing methods and environmental factors on cattle behaviour. Better for the cows, better for the cheese, better for the environment.
- Biodiversity, land use change, and human health in northeastern Madagascar: an interdisciplinary study. Paddy rice cultivation is bad for you.
- Local traditional foods contribute to diversity and species richness of rural women’s diet in Ecuador. Local food species are good for you.
- Illustrating the hidden economic, social and ecological values of global forage fish resources. $18.7 billion per annum, over 3 times of their direct catch value. But what exactly are they?
- Determination of carotenoids in sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas L., Lam) tubers: Implications for accurate provitamin A determination in staple sturdy tuber crops. Not all carotenoids have provitamin A properties.
- Evaluation of the Phytopathological Reaction of Wild and Cultivated Olives as a Means of Finding Promising New Sources of Genetic Diversity for Resistance to Root-Knot Nematodes. Some wild relatives could help.
- Picking from the Past in Preparation for a Pest: Seed Banks Outperform Herbaria as Sources of Preserved ‘Ōhi‘a Seed. I would hope so.
- Unearthing the “Lost” Andean Root Crop “Mauka” (Mirabilis expansa [Ruíz & Pav.] Standl.). On the rebound?
- High levels of recent wolf × dog introgressive hybridization in agricultural landscapes of central Italy. Not much real wolf left.
- A Road Map for Conservation, Use, and Public Engagement around North America’s Crop Wild Relatives and Wild Utilized Plants. Understand, protect, collect, conserve, make available, inform. Allrighty then.
- Open source seed, a revolution in breeding or yet another attack on the breeder’s exemption? May backfire.
- A global surveillance system for crop diseases. A Global Surveillance System, in fact. Here’s the origin story.
- New insights into Neolithic milk consumption through proteomic analysis of dental calculus. People unlikely to have lactase persistence consumed milk, which means either they were in constant discomfort or processed it in some way.
- Race and Region: Tracing the Cultural Pathways of Rice Consumption in the United States, 1680-1960. WW2 made it a cosmopolitan commodity.
- The climatic challenge: Which plants will people use in the next century? Depends on the tradeoffs between diversification-specialization and between substitution-adaptation.