Nibbles – Page 455 – Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

October 18, 2007

Ethnic holdout

Japanese-American farming.

October 18, 2007October 18, 2007

Fruit species blog

Fruitspecies blogs fruit species, mostly tropical.

October 17, 2007

Plants against toxins

GM phytoremediators suck up explosives, carcinogens.

October 17, 2007

Research Fellowships on offer

Pssst. Want a Research Fellowship? Nikolai and Otto say: “you know it makes sense”.

October 17, 2007

Adopt-a-variety

Adopt a banana variety at the Philippines genebank.

1. Swapping maize for indigenous crops won’t fix African food systems designed around markets and policies that still favour a narrow range of crops.
2. Cassava is both a food security fallback and a commercial crop in Uganda, but disease, climate change and declining diversity make its conservation an increasingly urgent form of insurance. But what about the markets and policies?
3. When livestock and crops fail, Ugandan pastoralists draw on wild plants for food, underlining how much food-system resilience still sits outside the formal agricultural system, with its markets and policies.
4. The Morton Arboretum is using living collections and genetic research to help the threatened butternut tree cope with changing conditions.
5. Webinar discusses global approaches to seed provenancing and transfer zones, useful for anyone who wants to move native plants without moving the wrong genes. Butternut very interested.
6. San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance’s Frozen Zoo preserves genetic material of plant and animal species that may disappear, from DNA to cells to organisms. Butternut volunteers.
7. New Indian facility combines ex situ fish conservation with community aquaculture. Good model for much of the above?
Published on October 6, 2026