- Kenya goes gung-ho for agrobiodiversity to make better use of scarce water.
- Peru enacts Law for the Promotion of Healthy Eating by Boys, Girls, and Adolescents to a mixed reception.
- Sent to Kazakhstan, a food writer thrills to dietary diversity in Almaty (without once mentioning apples).
- Holistic orchard conversion. “Turning an orchard from a lawn with fruit & nut trees in it into a purpose-built meadow with fruit & nut trees in it.”
- “Preservation of cultivar purity is a particular challenge for plants that are self-incompatible, and have easily germinating seeds and vigorously spreading rhizomes.” Amen.
- You’ve seen The Wire? Now read about The Duncan Street Miracle Garden.
Brainfood: Wild yeast, Sorbus evolution, Taro leaf blight, Vegetable sesame, Phast phenotyping, US CWR, Risk, Citizen science, GMOs, European meadow diversity, Hedysarum diversity, Pineapple diversity
- Introducing a New Breed of Wine Yeast: Interspecific Hybridisation between a Commercial Saccharomyces cerevisiae Wine Yeast and Saccharomyces mikatae. The future of wine?
- Breeding systems, hybridization and continuing evolution in Avon Gorge Sorbus. You had me at “Avon Gorge, Bristol, UK, is a world ‘hotspot’ for Sorbus diversity.”
- Taro leaf blight — A threat to global food security. Yes, but we have the technology…
- Agromorphological characterization of Sesamum radiatum (Schum. and Thonn.), a neglected and underutilized species of traditional leafy vegetable of great importance in Benin. Yes, but we need the technology…
- Phenoscope: an automated large-scale phenotyping platform offering high spatial homogeneity. Somebody mention technology?
- An Inventory of Crop Wild Relatives of the United States. More than you’d think.
- Empirical Test of an Agricultural Landscape Model. The Importance of Farmer Preference for Risk Aversion and Crop Complexity. It’s not just about profit. At least in the UK.
- Using citizen scientists to measure an ecosystem service nationwide. Bullshit. No, really, it’s about the decomposition of cow pats.
- Intragenesis and cisgenesis as alternatives to transgenic crop development. Spingenesis.
- Managing biodiversity rich hay meadows in the EU: a comparison of Swedish and Romanian grasslands. Both need more input from local knowledge.
- Mediterranean Hedysarum phylogeny by transferable microsatellites from Medicago. Wait, Sulla? What happened to Hedysarum?
- Polymorphic microsatellite markers in pineapple (Ananas comosus (L.) Merrill). And?
Nibbles: Bamboo shoots, Cassava bread, Tomato reefer, Visionary scientists, Price volatility, Potato nutrition, Climate change & biodiversity
- After artichokes and asparagus, bamboo, obviously.
- And after bamboo? Cassava, by any of its many names.
- Botanical confusion: “Good tomatoes are a lot harder to get than good pot.” Not where I come from.
- The Union of Concerned Scientists is concerned about US agriculture.
- Per Pinstrup-Andersen is concerned about food price volatility, not high food prices.
- And Jeremy is concerned that he may not be eating enough potatoes.
- Luigi, for his part, is concerned about the two thirds of common plants that CIAT et al. say could lose 50% of their range by 2080.
Brainfood: Forest restoration, Vegetable diversity, Intensification costs, Community forests, Baja oases, Nigerian foods, European wetlands, Landscape diversity & resilience, European conservation prioritization
- Can Ficus Sp. Forests Be Restored Through Vegetative Propagation? Yes. But with the reduced genetic diversity and all, for how long?
- A qualitative assessment of diversity and factors leading to genetic erosion of vegetables: a case study of Varamin (Iran). Species richness only, settle down. But, pace the title, quantitative.
- Agricultural intensification escalates future conservation costs. Because of higher land rents. Just can’t win.
- Common property protected areas: Community control in forest conservation. They can work.
- Baja California peninsula oases: An agro-biodiversity of isolation and integration. Both too much and too little isolation are bad.
- Cultivated, caught, and collected: defining culturally appropriate foods in Tallé, Niger. …and integrating them into development.
- Wetlands in Europe: Perspectives for restoration of a lost paradise. Down to 20% and counting. Someone should count the crop wild relatives in them.
- Economic Resilience and Land use: The Cocoa Crisis in the Rio Cachoeira Catchment, Brazil. Diverse land use means more resilience.
- Priorities for biodiversity monitoring in Europe: A review of supranational policies and a novel scheme for integrative prioritization. Yeah, but doesn’t integrate crop wild relatives, does it?
Brainfood: Carrot domestication, Nigerian diets, Rotations & ecosystem services, Bangladeshi diets, Maize breeding sites, Olives and climate change, Mixtures and invertebrates, Genebank information systems
- Genetic structure and domestication of carrot (Daucus carota subsp. sativus) (Apiaceae). Origin in Central Asia, but no genetic bottleneck (sic).
- Data collection and assessment of commonly consumed foods and recipes in six geo-political zones in Nigeria: Important for the development of a National Food Composition Database and Dietary Assessment. Nigerians eat a lot of soup.
- The integration of crop rotation and tillage practices in the assessment of ecosystem services provision at the regional scale. Good trick if you can do it.
- Nutritional composition of minor indigenous fruits: Cheapest nutritional source for the rural people of Bangladesh. If only the rural people knew about this.
- Effectiveness of selection at CIMMYT’s main maize breeding sites in Mexico for performance at sites in Africa and vice versa. Is high. Phew.
- Olive trees as bio-indicators of climate evolution in the Mediterranean Basin. Olives in Germany by 2100?
- Crop genetic diversity benefits farmland biodiversity in cultivated fields. Mixed wheat fields better for soil invertebrate biodiversity than fields with single varieties.
- IT background of the medium-term storage of Martonvásár Cereal Genebank resources in phytotron cold rooms. The interesting thing is that the system links genebank data with breeders’ data. Don’t see that a lot.