- Innovations for sustainable food systems: genebanks are in there but frankly I find the whole thing a bit problematic. Just gonna leave that there. Feel free to comment here.
- Colin Khoury’s backstory. Also some CWR.
- The fight against pathogens. Of plants, settle down.
- Better Napier grass is good for everyone. Including the cows. But wait, “…[i]t doesn’t really matter which grass…”
- Phenome2020 recapped.
Nibbles: Trade & nutrition, Apple trifecta, Cider, Neolithic migrations, IIED double
- Getting trade to contribute to nutrition. Hard row to hoe.
- Elegiac introduction & postscript by Robert Macfarlane to a fabulous pean to wild Kazakhstan apples by the late, great Roger Deakin called East to Eden.
- And the connection between the above and “wild” apples in Scotland.
- An expensive poster showing how domesticated apple varieties relate to each other. I have to say I’m sorely tempted.
- Sorely tempted by this documentary on some cidermakers’ trip to Kazakhstan too.
- Nice to see my map of barley genebank accessions used in a blog post about mapping human DNA phylogenies.
- Your regular reminder that “PCLG is an international network of organisations coordinated by IIED that promotes learning on the linkages between people and biodiversity conservation” and that their newsletter is well worth subscribing too.
- And here are IIED’s best publications of 2019, including “Biodiversity loss is a development issue,” which is one of the great titles of our time, and not a bad paper either.
Nibbles: CWR book, Seed pix, Distilling, Sorghum, Posters, Self-sufficiency
- E-book on using crop wild relatives in breeding.
- The aesthetics of conserving seeds.
- The best corn for whiskey.
- Going back to sorghum in Kenya.
- Another take on how to make a cool scientific poster.
- One way to crunch the numbers on eating local.
Not that kind of flesh
Oh, Twitter, you’re such a tease.
Knowing that I am currently working on orange-fleshed sweetpotatoes, Luigi kindly sent me a link to a tweet. This one:
That red ellipse? I’m drawing your attention to Twitter’s warning that seeing the images might bring on an attack of the vapours in highly-attuned personalities.
Is it just the word “fleshed”? I had to know.
I dunno. “Filth,” they say, “is in the mind of the beholder” and I have to say, I’m not seeing it.
Orange-flesh, though. Where else have I seen that? Maybe that’s what Twitter is trying to warn me against.
No matter. Congratulations to @CIPotato and @RTB_CGIAR.
Brainfood: Agrobiodiversity Index, Breeding strategy, Soybean breeding, Red Listing, Stunting, Planetary boundaries, ITPGRFA, Wheat domestication, Anthropogenic fire double, Japonica diversity, Rice landraces, Tepary breeding, Lupin genome, Hazelnut diversity, Lapita food
- Text Mining National Commitments towards Agrobiodiversity Conservation and Use. Fancy maths cannot find evidence of country commitment to seed diversity.
- Optimized breeding strategies to harness Genetic Resources with different performance levels. How a public breeding programme can help out private breeding programme.
- Introgression of novel genetic diversity to improve soybean yield. Public breeding programme helps out private breeding programme. I suppose both got something out of it.
- Rapid Least Concern: towards automating Red List assessments. Nifty web application takes all the fun out of red listing. We talked about this, people.
- Mapping child growth failure across low- and middle-income countries. Even countries and regions that are generally doing well have stubborn hotspots.
- Feeding ten billion people is possible within four terrestrial planetary boundaries. Feeding, but not necessarily nourishing.
- Genebank Operation in the Arena of Access and Benefit-Sharing Policies. Use the SMTA for everything.
- Multiregional origins of the domesticated tetraploid wheats. Semi-domesticated in the southern Levant, then moved to the northern Fertile Crescent to be finished off. Compare and contrast with barley.
- Conservation implications of limited Native American impacts in pre-contact New England. Native Americans didn’t manage woodland by controlled burning after all…
- Global change impacts on forest and fire dynamics using paleoecology and tree census data for eastern North America. …Sure they did. Interesting discussion on this on Twitter.
- Multiple streams of genetic diversity in Japonica rice. It’s basically a pan-genome.
- Genomic analyses reveal selection footprints in rice landraces grown under on‐farm conservation conditions during a short‐term period of domestication. Some interesting genetic changes after 27 years of on-farm management, but no erosion.
- Breeding tepary bean (Phaseolus acutifolius) for drought adaptation: A review. You need other species.
- High-quality genome sequence of white lupin provides insight into soil exploration and seed quality. Winter and spring varieties are genetically distinct from each other, and from landraces.
- Genetic diversity and domestication of hazelnut (Corylus avellana L.) in Turkey. Hardly domesticated at all.
- Exploitation and utilization of tropical rainforests indicated in dental calculus of ancient Oceanic Lapita culture colonists. Including bananas.
- Benchmarking genetic diversity in a third-generation breeding population of Melaleuca alternifolia. There’s still quite a bit of diversity around.