- Nice video on Future Climate for Africa.
- Indian forest communities diversify with lemongrass to help out with their climate change resilience.
- Have they tried millets, though? According to Millet Finder, millet products are taking over the world, so marketing should be no problem.
- If they don’t have seeds, they can get them from genebanks, via Germplasm Health Units, of course. The impact pathways of genebanks goes through GHUs.
- The Russet Burbank sure has had a big impact.
Nibbles: Seedscapes, Bee map, Sacred bananas, Sustainable eating, Hazelnuts, Investing
Nibbles: MSB birthday, Ethiopia impact, Coffee threats, African greens
- It’s 20 years of the Millennium Seed Bank. Happy birthday!
- CGIAR summarizes 20 years of impact in Ethiopia.
- In 20 years, half of Africa’s coffee land could be gone. Well, 30, but I need to keep this streak going.
- Must have been about 20 years ago that systematic research on African indigenous vegetables really took off, and now look.
Nibbles: HarvestPlus, Peppers, Dreaming, Botanical rescue, Feed database, Pigs in E Germany, Old apple
- Genebanks for nutrition. Indeed they are.
- Hot peppers may be good for you. Genebanks alerted.
- For Aboriginal Australians, knowledge is held by the living landscape, and humans get together to animate it. Fascinating.
- Humans getting together to rescue near-extinct plants from wounded landscapes of North America.
- There’s a database of animal feeds for sub-Saharan Africa. Could do with being mashed up with genebank databases, no?
- Agriculture under communism wasn’t all that communist. At least in E. Germany. I wonder what they were fed.
- A 4000-year-old apple core found in Vienna. Any DNA though?
Brainfood: Diversification, Annona, Banana genebank, Sustainable livestock, One Health, Polyploidy, Breeding pipeline, Evolutionary breeding, Seed storage, European landraces, Governance, Virgin oil, Cereal nutrition, Spinach origins, Botany apps
- Agricultural diversification promotes multiple ecosystem services without compromising yield. Meta-meta-analysis shows diversification is good for biodiversity, pollination, pest control, nutrient cycling, soil fertility, and water regulation and not bad for crop yields either.
- Holocene land and sea‐trade routes explain complex patterns of pre‐Columbian crop dispersion. Cherimoya reached the Andes by boat.
- Safeguarding and using global banana diversity: a holistic approach. 1617 banana accessions from 38 countries maintained in an in vitro collection, backed-up in cryo; over 18,000 samples distributed to researchers and farmers in 113 countries in 35 years. And that’s just the basics.
- Designing sustainable pathways for the livestock sector: the example of Atsbi, Ethiopia and Bama, Burkina Faso. It’s not just a straight choice between intensive or extensive production, stop with the dichotomies.
- Moving health to the heart of agri-food policies; mitigating risk from our food systems. It’s difficult to separate food from health; and yet…
- Genes derived from ancient polyploidy have higher genetic diversity and are associated with domestication in Brassica rapa. Agriculture depends on polyploidy.
- Genetic diversity is indispensable for plant breeding to improve crops. Plant breeding from an industry perspective, using the Brassicaceae as a case study.
- Yield, yield stability and farmers’ preferences of evolutionary populations of bread wheat: A dynamic solution to climate change. A totally different perspective to the above, using a totally different crop. Compare and contrast.
- Enhancing seed conservation in rural communities of Guatemala by implementing the dry chain concept. Cool way for farmers to save their seeds so they can do the above.
- Landrace hotspots identification in Europe. Where to implement the above.
- Innovation and the commons: lessons from the governance of genetic resources in potato breeding. This is a tricky one. Near as I can figure it, the authors are trying to say that it’s difficult to govern genetic resources apart from the tools needed to develop and use them. But hey, you have a go.
- Conservation of Native Wild Ivory-White Olives from the MEDES Islands Natural Reserve to Maintain Virgin Olive Oil Diversity. I did not have an endemic insular wild albino olive on my bingo card.
- Agri-nutrition research: Revisiting the contribution of maize and wheat to human nutrition and health. Staple cereals are more nutritious than often thought.
- On the origin and dispersal of cultivated spinach (Spinacia oleracea L.). Spinach originated more eastward than often thought.
- What plant is that? Tests of automated image recognition apps for plant identification on plants from the British flora. Botanists shouldn’t give up their day jobs.