Nibbles

Nibbles: Banana bionformatics, Banana problems, Dietary diversity indicator, SoD meet, MSSRF & millets, Intercropping tree crops, Ecosystem management, UNEP atlas, Pacific ABS, Seed theft

Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services documents examples of how indigenous people’s knowledge conserves biodiversity, including of the agricultural kind.
The truth about frankincense and myrrh. Talk about traditional knowledge.
Can global crop production meet future demands? The Story Map.
What ICRISAT is doing about the above, from the horse’s mouth.
Progress in Achieving and Delivering Drought Tolerance in Maize — An Update: “Germplasm collections are assuming greater importance if gains from native genes are to be sustained. Efficient and accurate field phenotyping remains essential for genetic progress.”
Workshop in Field-based High Throughput Phenotyping. Next April, in Arizona, you maize people.
A clone is a clone is… no wait.
Root and tuber people already planning their next big shindig, in October 2015. Meanwhile, they’re getting down to work in the Pacific.
AoB Blog on plant science on Facebook. Also on Facebook.
Solanum expert Dr Sandy Knapp on the of Global Plants Initiative.
Archaeological remains of agriculture found in Nuevo Leon are oldest for that Mexican state.
Legumes (genera) of the world now online, thanks to Kew.

One (admittedly fairly big) thing to do to fix the food system.
Two-faced fique.
14 minutes — count them — on the Land Institute’s work on perennial cereals. Well worth it.
18 graphics to explain the food system. You know, the one that needs fixing.

Emma Cooper blogs her ethnobotanical MSc dissertation on British homegardeners and their cool crops.
If she’d done her work in Sweden, she’d have written about Ragnar Pettersson and his “treasure of Ardre.”
The downside of backyard farming: homeless hens.
International e-Conference on Germplasm Data Interoperability: Genebank Database Hell gets an e-conference. What could possibly go wrong.
Apparently there’s a new way to search for agricultural bibliografic (sic) data.
CIMMYT gets its maize out there.
ICRISAT is not one to hide its light under a bushel either.
Aussies to survey their yeasts and bacteria to improve winemaking.
The problems of India: “It takes a particular brand of incompetence and neglect for decades of stellar growth to have no apparent impact on India’s sky-high levels of under-nutrition.” I bet Dreze and Sen didn’t include a food bubble. Hey, but that can be exported.
Oh and happy World Soil Day! Thanks to it, and Jim Croft, I now know Australia has a sort of soil genebank.

Plants for Europe is (are?) incensed about new EU regulations. Should it/they be?
Squash is a Native American word, natch. I bet they’re incensed.
Speaking of Native American crops, here’s a big writeup on the potato, including great pix, and nice shoutout for the CIP genebank.
If you live in the tropics and want to learn about agroforestry, you could just go out and talk to the first smallholder you meet. Or you could read a textbook.
A roundtable on whether genetics can help us figure out whether wine is good for you. When they do the large scale clinical trial, as they surely must, I’ll be first in line.
The breakthroughs of agriculture. Sadly, working out the seed viability equation does not feature. Nor does vegetarianism.
Breeding does, though. And here’s an example why, featuring soybeans.
And another from rice: IRRI bags another silver bullet gene.
And we’ll soon have those in cotton too.
Which is all fully recognized in the latest WRI report on how to feed the world.
Though not in this other mega-report on Brazil, at least not quite so explicitly.
“We need more research” is the wrong answer. Even when it’s breeding?