- A Molecular and Fitness Evaluation of Commercially Available versus Locally Collected Blue Lupine Lupinus perennis L. Seeds for Use in Ecosystem Restoration Efforts. Commercial seed sources can be dodgy, and that’s a problem.
- Comparison of responses to drought stress of 100 wheat accessions and landraces to identify opportunities for improving wheat drought resistance. 20 Balkan landraces seemed to be more drought tolerant than 80 accessions sourced globally.
- Towards next-generation biodiversity assessment using DNA metabarcoding. You gotta be kidding me, metabarcoding? Will they be applying it to soils? Yep.
- Selection and microevolution of coat pattern are cryptic in a wild population of sheep. You need to look at the genes.
- Will they buy it? The potential for marketing organic vegetables in the food vending sector to strengthen vegetable safety: A choice experiment study in three West African cities. Not enough.
- Plant diversity improves protection against soil-borne pathogens by fostering antagonistic bacterial communities. Chalk another one up to diversity. Did they say soil?
- Local scale patterns of gene flow and genetic diversity in a crop–wild–weedy complex of sorghum (Sorghum bicolor (L.) Moench) under traditional agricultural field conditions in Kenya. Mostly crop-to-wild, which could be a problem if transgenics are ever grown. If.
- Adaptation with gene flow across the landscape in a dune sunflower… is leading to “ecological” speciation.
Brainfood: Pollinator threats, Predicting drought tolerance, Markets and conservation, Groundnut oil composition diversity, European wheat landraces, Dung beetles, Livelihoods, Phenology
- Impact of landscape alteration and invasions on pollinators: a meta-analysis. Habitat alteration and invasions equally bad on visitation rates, invasive animals more bad than invasive plants, and disturbance of the matrix more than fragment size. But there are some differences among vegetation types.
- The determinants of leaf turgor loss point and prediction of drought tolerance of species and biomes: a global meta-analysis. Osmotic potential at full turgor could be used to predict drought tolerance across species. Cut a long story short, that simplifies down to salty cell sap, give or take. Good for choosing crop wild relatives to use in breeding for drought tolerance?
- Market-based instruments for biodiversity and ecosystem services: A lexicon. If you want to tell your tradable permits from your reverse auctions. And really, who doesn’t?
- Phenotypic and molecular dissection of ICRISAT mini core collection of peanut (Arachis hypogaea L.) for high oleic acid. Much diversity in oleic acid (O) to low linoleic acid (L) ratio found. Breeders alerted.
- Phenotypic diversity and evolution of farmer varieties of bread wheat on organic farms in Europe. There wasn’t much of it, over 3 years.
- A Comparison of Dung Beetle (Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae) Attraction to Native and Exotic Mammal Dung. They really know their shit.
- Small-scale farming in semi-arid areas: Livelihood dynamics between 1997 and 2010 in Laikipia, Kenya. Life continues to be a bitch, there’s no other way to say it. But when will the people who measure livelihoods measure the diversity of people’s assets as well as their size?
- Climate-associated phenological advances in bee pollinators and bee-pollinated plants. About 10 days over the past 130 years, most of the change since 1970, and bee plants keeping pace with bees.
Nibbles: All singing and dancing, FAO meets Big Data, Clone this, Patent nonsense, Frozen fish
- Fisherfolk of the Amazon landed on film. But do they sing about it? (And it’s not just an Amazon thing, this dancing and singing about agrobiodiversity. Not by any means.) And should they be doing more slashing-and-burning?
- FAO to put all its data in one basket. But including AnGR? WIEWS? One asks more in hope than expectation.
- One of the many challenges of vegetatively propagated crops (like potatoes): rapid multiplication. (Well, they could always do an SNP-based tetraploid map of the damn things, couldn’t they.) No such problems with seeds, of course.
- There’s been a rapid increase in the patenting of adaptation-related traits, and the private sector in industrialized countries is mainly responsible. Well there’s a surprise. But was that discussed at the CCAFS meeting on breeding objectives for Africa? And it’s just as well to remember that it’s not just breeding that’s needed. Oh, but by the way, you better grab those adaptations while you can…
- Regional SE Asian fish genebank proposed. That I’d love to see. Maybe they could share germplasm with, I dunno, Chicago? And not just.
Nibbles: Baby ginger, Livestock, Teaching, Organic seeds, Pawpaw, Citrus, Ethiopia
- Baby ginger, if you can offer tropical conditions and want to make money.
- ILRI beefs about the lack of interest in livestock in the run-up to Rio+20.
- Teachers! A resource! What Are Seed Gene Banks and How Do They Work?
- Farmer unthreatened by GMOs grows organic seed for others.
- Botanist documents flowers of (one kind of) pawpaw.
- Woman takes a trip down memory lane during visit to citrus field genebank.
- Ethiopians improve their food security with roots and tubers. Wot, no bananas?
Nibbles: Feeding the world edition
- BBC says we can feed the world through technology. And why not. The Times of India, meanwhile, didn’t get the memo.
- Bill Gates at the IFAD Governing Council will probably say the same thing today. And put his money where his mouth is.
- CIMMYT Director General said the same recently at an Economist conference. Funny how genebanks are rarely among the saviour technologies being touted.
- It’s all about the scaling up, isn’t it?
- Tell that to the Lake Chad fisherfolk who are now turning to farming.
- And, in another universe, sushi seeks protection.
- Buffel vs Rhodes in the Arabian peninsula.