Policy

May 22, 2026May 22, 2026

MLS spoiler alert

Remember that “A comprehensive analysis of the operations of the Multilateral System – Insights and key figures 2025” that we trailed a few months back? The official launch is on 22 May and you can follow along virtually.

LATER: And these are the key takeaways, according to the Plant Treaty secretariat…

May 21, 2026

Nibbles: Svalbard prize, Rice breeding, Coffee geography, Biodiversity loss monitoring, Spatial data

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault gets the Princesa de Asturias Prize for international cooperation. Time to celebrate.
Celebrating Pamela Ronald and scuba rice.
Celebrating Ohsoon Yun and the geography of coffee.
I’ll certainly celebrate if the approach of the NATURE-FIRST project can be applied to loss of agricultural biodiversity one day.
The World Bank is in a celebratory mood with regards to geospatial and Earth observation data. I’ll join them when they fund a NATURE-FIRST for crop diversity.

May 18, 2026May 16, 2026

Brainfood: Spatial data edition

The ClimSat classification system—a global climate classification map based on long-term satellite-derived data. There’s a new global climate classification system in town, and it’s better ecologically than Köppen’s.
The first global agricultural field boundary map at 10 m resolution. Combined with the above, we can now characterize the climate of every agricultural field in the world.
GEM-Forest: A Global satellite EMbedding–based map of forests and tree crops for 2020. Do any of those fields have tree crops? And how far is the forest?
Global annual cropland dynamics 2015–2024. The next time we map agricultural field boundaries, there will probably be more of them.
Climate-induced range shifts support local plant diversity but don’t reduce extinction risk. Those new agricultural fields will be bad for wild plants.
‘SiteTool’: a ‘Shiny’ application for field site selection and evaluation. Cool new tool helps you select geographical sites based on ecological characteristics. Could be used to help decide where to collect or evaluate germplasm. Lots of opportunities for combining with some of the above, I suspect.
Current and future potential of cassava (Manihot esculenta) in Southern Africa: a scoping review. An example of what you can do when you combine different types of spatial (and other data). The area suitable for cassava in Africa will increase, and there’s lots of scope for higher yields too. If we can combine datasets, soon we’ll know which specific fields to grow it in, for higher production, to protect wild biodiversity…
Global and regional climate modes modulate armed conflict risk. …and to mitigate the risk of conflict.

May 11, 2026May 9, 2026

Brainfood: Targets, Plant Treaty, Decolonization, Fonio germination, Recalcitrant seeds, Microbiome, Taro seed system

Status and future of seed conservation of threatened plants in the post-2020 era. 21% of threatened plants are conserved in genebanks across 44 countries in Europe and western Asia. Not bad, but not good enough. I wonder how many of those 21% will be of interest to breeders?
How the international treaty on plant genetic resources for food and agriculture can support effective germplasm exchange: four Colombian case studies. The Plant Treaty can really help a country’s genebanks and breeders drive agricultural development, given half a chance.
Reconciliation or re-colonization? Critical perspectives on seed banking and colonialism. Indigenous communities need to be careful in collaborating with genebanks and breeders.
Impacts of climate change on fonio millet: seed germination ecology and suitability modelling of an indigenous West African cereal. Climate change will screw up the germination of fonio in some places, so genebanks and breeders better get cracking.
Euterpe edulis seed recalcitrance: difficult, yes, but not impossible to genebank. Tricky seed storage behaviour need not deter genebankers.
Accelerated aging caused diversity and specificity loss in the bacterial communities of Brassica napus seedlings. Genebanks should be careful with their seed aging experiments, because they might screw up the seed microbiome.
Understanding Biotic Constraints to Taro (Colocasia esculenta) Production in the Derived Savanna and Humid Forest Agroecosystems of Nigeria. Genebanks need seed systems though.

April 30, 2026May 7, 2026

Underselling breeding, and conservation

Crops with massive … importance, clear biological upside, and real demand for better genetics — but a system where breeding remains small, underfunded, and structurally difficult to scale.

What crops, you ask? “Opportunity crops,” perhaps? Fonio, say, or Bambara groundnut, or any number of African leafy vegetables.

Those would have been good guesses, but actually I cheated, so no. The word hidden by the ellipsis is actually “economic,” and the quote comes from a Reddit post on coffee breeding. ¹

That of course makes the observation even more amazing. As the Reddit poster goes on to point out:

We’ve built a ~$100B global industry that depends on plant genetics… while seemingly allocating only a negligible fraction of that value to actually improving those genetics.

And, I would add, allocating an even more negligible fraction to conserving those genetics (despite the fact that there’s a pretty solid strategy for how to do that). Which goes for opportunity crops too, come to think of it.