- Living Links Connecting the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals: Small-Scale Farmers and Agricultural Biodiversity. Want to address a whole bunch of SDGs at once? Here’s a tip…
- Archaeology for Sustainable Agriculture. Sustainability is not forever.
- A Congo Basin ethnographic analogue of pre-Columbian Amazonian raised fields shows the ephemeral legacy of organic matter management. Another example of the above?
- Genebank Phenomics: A Strategic Approach to Enhance Value and Utilization of Crop Germplasm. A lot of useful phenotyping can be done fast and cheap, and genebanks should do it.
- LeafMachine: Using machine learning to automate leaf trait extraction from digitized herbarium specimens. This might help with the above.
- Affordable Phenotyping of Winter Wheat under Field and Controlled Conditions for Drought Tolerance. This certainly could. Basically a supermarket cart with a drone mounted on top of it.
- Plant Breeding Capacity in U.S. Public Institutions. It’s in trouble.
- Redomesticating Almond to Meet Emerging Food Safety Needs. Turning to peach, wild and cultivated, to reduce immunoreactivity and control aflatoxin and Salmonella. Somebody say public breeding is in trouble?
- Genetic variability among Ethiopian sorghum landrace accessions for major agro-morphological traits and anthracnose resistance. From 360 accessions to 10. Let’s hope at least the public sector can get hold of them.
- Review: Genetic and genomic selection as a methane mitigation strategy in dairy cattle. Gotta measure emissions on individual animals.
- Genome sequence and comparative analysis of reindeer (Rangifer tarandus) in northern Eurasia. Two domestications, affecting at least a dozen genes. No word on methane.
- Genomes on Canvas: Artist’s Perspective on Evolution of Plant-Based Foods. Crowdsourcing historical images to trace crop evolution.
Nibbles: Coconut & biodiversity, Nutrition, Maize volatiles, Tea history, OFS online, AGRA, Forage breeding, Grapevine editing, SDG indicators, Black Lives Matter
- Coconut oil is the new palm oil? And not in a good way.
- The cost of poor diets is considerable.
- Maize plants call natural enemies for help against stemborers. And there’s variation in how well they do it, natch.
- Fortune’s fortune: the colonization of tea. With added poison. And capitalism.
- The Oxford Food Symposium is on, virtually. Registration is closed, but follow on the blog, social media etc.
- Criticism of the Green Revolution approach to African agricultural development.
- Forages, from genebanks to farmers, in one interactive infographic.
- Saving Sangiovese through gene editing: the infographic. Not interactive, though, alas.
- How FAO keeps track of progress on the SDGs.
- How to not be a racist in the plant sciences.
Brainfood: Sled dogs, Chicken origins, Ancient livestock, Tenure and deforestation, Buckwheat, Soybean pangenome, Yam bean nutrients, Orphan legumes, Wild seeds, SeedGerm, Coconut conservation
- Arctic-adapted dogs emerged at the Pleistocene–Holocene transition. Sled dogs arose in Siberia, where they interbred with wolves.
- 863 genomes reveal the origin and domestication of chicken. It was Gallus gallus spadiceus from southwestern China, northern Thailand and Myanmar that was domesticated, possibly by rice and millet cultivators, according to Dorian Fuller, who disagrees with the domestication dates but likes the rest of the paper.
- Fodder for Change: Animals, Urbanisation, and Socio-Economic Transformation in Protohistoric Italy. In first-millennium BCE Italy, pigs grew in importance, cattle increased in size, sheep breeds differentiated according to use, and the chickens was adopted and adapted.
- Formalizing land rights can reduce forest loss: Experimental evidence from Benin. Randomized control trial shows land registration is associated with less deforestation.
- Buckwheat (Fagopyrum sp.) genetic resources: What can they contribute towards nutritional security of changing world? Not much until given the full -omics treatment, apparently.
- Pan-Genome of Wild and Cultivated Soybeans. The pan-genome is the new genome. Wait, did I use that before?
- Developing the role of legumes in West Africa under climate change. Lesser know, orphan legumes could step in for cowpea in some places, if only we knew more about them. Like a pan-genome, I guess.
- Evaluation of Nutritional and Antinutritional Properties of African Yam Bean (Sphenostylis stenocarpa (Hochst ex. A. Rich.) Harms.) Seeds. But we do know more about them! Lots of variation available to combat protein malnutrition, if only farmers grew more of the stuff. Oh so now it’s their fault?
- Conserving orthodox seeds of globally threatened plants ex situ in the Millennium Seed Bank, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, UK: the status of seed collections. Some decline in germinability for about 16% of samples. Includes successful germination protocols for 165 globally threatened seed plant taxa.
- SeedGerm: a cost‐effective phenotyping platform for automated seed imaging and machine‐learning based phenotypic analysis of crop seed germination. Fancy kit and maths can match seed specialists in scoring radicle emergence. But will it work with wild seeds? MSB unavailable for comment.
- In Situ and Ex Situ Conservation of Coconut Genetic Resources. Beyond coconut-only genebanks. I’d like to see SeedGerm work on this lot. Check out the whole book.
Brainfood: Biodiversity targets, Image software, Potato efficiency, Cassava cyanide, Popcorn, Payment for agrobiodiversity, Walnut conservation, Grapevine leaves, Pigeonpea haplotypes, Chakras, Diet & diversity, Seed activism, Seed longevity
- Genetic diversity targets and indicators in the CBD post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework must be improved. Better than accession numbers? Well, yeah, but will it matter?
- FIELDimageR: An R package to analyze orthomosaic images from agricultural field trials. Extract plot-level results from your drone shots, automagically.
- Radiation Interception, Conversion and Partitioning Efficiency in Potato Landraces: How Far Are We from the Optimum? Quite far, but perhaps more interestingly you can predict tuber yield from time-series aerial imagery. Which means the above could come in useful.
- Genetic architecture and gene mapping of cyanide in cassava (Manihot esculenta Crantz.). High cyanide alleles in 2 major genes mainly found along Amazonian rivers and in coastal areas of Brazil. Drones unavailable for comment.
- Relationships among American popcorn and their links with landraces conserved in a microcenter of diversity. Did the diverse popcorns of southern Brazil derive from local diversification or independent local domestication? More work needed. Anyone going to mash this up with the cassava result above?
- Payments for agrobiodiversity conservation services: An overview of Latin American experiences, lessons learned and upscaling challenges. 5 ha of each of 100 varieties will cost you US$70,000 p.a. at a 5% discount rate. Bargain.
- Diversity Under Threat: Connecting Genetic Diversity and Threat Mapping to Set Conservation Priorities for Juglans regia L. Populations in Central Asia. Ex situ where threat level from climate change is severe, in situ where threat level due to climate change is minor, assisted natural regeneration where threat level from climate change is minor but severe from other things, like overgrazing. No word on payments for ecosystem services rendered.
- Composite modeling of leaf shape across shoots discriminates Vitis species better than individual leaves. Fancy maths used to composite leaf shapes along a shoot as a way of telling species apart.
- Superior haplotypes for haplotype‐based breeding for drought tolerance in pigeonpea (Cajanus cajan L.). From 10 genes and about 300 genotypes to 17 accessions with 4 superior haplotypes.
- Create Space for Indigenous Leadership to Preserve Agricultural Biodiversity. In the Ecuadorian Amazon, cacao production for cash is not driving down agrobiodiversity.
- Conceptual Links between Landscape Diversity and Diet Diversity: A Roadmap for Transdisciplinary Research. There are 4 different pathways whereby diverse forested landscapes can lead to diet diversity.
- ‘Keeping seeds in our hands’: the rise of seed activism. While the formal sector is still arguing about farmers’ rights, activists have moved the paradigm to seed sovereignty.
- Thirty-year monitoring and statistical analysis of 50 species’ germinability in genebank medium-term storage suggest specific characteristics in seed longevity. Huge dataset reveals some geographic variation in seed longevity within crops, among other things.
Nibbles: Seed movement edition
- From Indigenous communities, to Carol and Robert Mouck, to the Sisters of Providence of St. Vincent de Paul Motherhouse, to the Kingston Area Seed System Initiative and Ratinenhayén:thos: seed rematriation in Canada.
- Simran Sethi gets to the bottom of the COVID seed sales surge.
- And more on the same from Dan Saladino.
- There’s been quite a surge in quinoa in the past few years. All presentations here.
- And the potato has been getting around too of course. The podcast of the book.