- Latest on the ICARDA genebank from the author of The Profit of the Earth.
- Honey diversity in Mexico.
- Speaking of which, did we already point to the new, improved Non-wood Forest Products Newsletter?
- The schisandra berry is apparently helping save the panda. Yeah, I never heard of it either, but more power to its elbow.
- Make your day better by looking at pictures of aquatic camels.
- Oh, here we go, cue the endless stream of stories about how genomics will save beer.
- “In the last century, 94% of the world’s seed varieties have disappeared.” No, they bloody haven’t. Only linking to this for completeness.
- Breeders get into flavour. Because celebrity chefs.
- That’s one tall maize plant. No, but really tall.
- The Great Plains are in Great Trouble: “Hundreds of species call the prairie home… A cornfield, on the other hand, is a field of corn.”
- A project dedicated to the genetic improvement of US rosaceous crops. Love that word. Rosaceous.
- Eat those millets!
- Sesame opens doors in Tanzania. See what I did there?
- Interview on conserving Europe’s livestock diversity.
- WorldVeg empowers women through gardening. I know how they feel. Well, kinda.
- Want a Forbidden Apple? You know you do. #resist
- “Accustomed to seeing crops planted in straight rows featuring one or a few different varieties, Muir and his European predecessors were not prepared to recognize this subtler form of horticulture. And so they viewed California Indians as lazily gathering the fat of a landscape they had hardly touched.”
Brainfood: Banana identification, Donkey domestication, Mouse domestication, African cattle, Pig domestication, Biofuels, Biofortification, Genomics for breeding, Species movement, Crop diversity double, N fixation, Ag commercialization models, Wild beans, Brassica domestication, Teaching biodiversity
- Molecular and cytological characterization of the global Musa germplasm collection provides insights into the treasure of banana diversity. 16% of 1500 accessions need taxonomic verification. Could have been much worse.
- Why the Donkey Did Not Go South: Disease as a Constraint on the Spread of Equus asinus into Southern Africa. Gap in distribution between Kenya and southern Africa until colonial times probably down to trypanosomiasis.
- Origins of house mice in ecological niches created by settled hunter-gatherers in the Levant 15,000 y ago. Hunter gatherers inadvertently domesticated the mouse.
- The genome landscape of indigenous African cattle. Now we know where the genes for heat tolerance and tick resistance can be found, and it’s where you’d think.
- Insights into early pig domestication provided by ancient DNA analysis. In northern Europe, around 4000 BC, people started crossing pigs from the south with local wild boars. What were they thinking?
- Recent grassland losses are concentrated around U.S. ethanol refineries. The revenge of geography.
- Provitamin A biofortification of crop plants: a gold rush with many miners. “One crucial aspect that needs further experimentation is whether β-carotene-fortified crops can improve vitamin A status in the main targets of the biofortification efforts, that is, malnourished adults and children.” Just going to leave that out there.
- Genomic innovation for crop improvement. Longer reads needed. Is there no satisfying these gene-jockeys?
- Biodiversity redistribution under climate change: Impacts on ecosystems and human well-being. Species movements affect ecosystem functioning and service provision: “The indirect effects of climate change on food webs are also expected to compound the direct effects on crops.”
- Feeding the Household, Growing the Business, or Just Showing Off? Farmers’ Motivations for Crop Diversity Choices in Papua New Guinea. Some people grow lots of crops because it’s cool. But why wasn’t this done at the intraspecific level?
- To Specialize or Diversify: Agricultural Diversity and Poverty Dynamics in Ethiopia. Forget coolness, crop diversity makes you less poor.
- Biogeography of nodulated legumes and their nitrogen-fixing symbionts. Australia is weird.
- Plantations, outgrowers and commercial farming in Africa: agricultural commercialisation and implications for agrarian change. They all have their place.
- Genomic history of the origin and domestication of common bean unveils its closest sister species. Wild populations from northern Peru and Ecuador are not derived from wild Phaseolus vulgaris which migrated there from Mesoamerica but are actually a different species which predates the evolution of wild common bean.
- Genomic inferences of domestication events are corroborated by written records in Brassica rapa. Five genetic groups, with rapini at the base.
- Walking and talking the tree of life: Why and how to teach about biodiversity. Forget ranks, try clades.
Nibbles: Give a man a chicken, Pollinator selection, Bananapocalypse redux, Red kiwi, ICARDA genebank, Dark comms, Food design, Traditional diets, Revitalizing villages, Peruvian diversity, Moving botany
- Which should come first, the chicken or the cash? MIL unavailable for comment.
- Pollinators are mini plant breeders.
- Save the Cavendish! No, wait…
- There’s a red kiwi coming. Eventually. No, not left-wing New Zealanders.
- ICARDA decentralizes its genebank. But we knew that.
- GFAR webinars on communicating research.
- Designing food. What could possibly go wrong?
- Decolonize it instead.
- Ecotourism in Portugal. No word on whether decolonized food involved.
- Kickstarter on documenting food crops in Peru, decolonized or not.
- Tracing the colonization and (hopefully) decolonization of economic botany products. Fascinating idea.
Brainfood: Wild peanuts, Salt-tolerance, Melon diversity, Consumption & biodiversity, German veggie fanciers, Oh oh oomycetes, Miscanthus diversity, Urban pollinators, Milpa bees
- Genomic characterisation of Arachis porphyrocalyx (Valls & C.E. Simpson, 2005) (Leguminosae): multiple origin of Arachis species with x=9. At least two distinct origins for the x=9 species.
- Salt Tolerant Varieties: A Biological Intervention to Manage Saline and Sodic Environment and Sustain Livelihoods. Salt-tolerant rice and wheat varieties are being adopted where needed in this bit of Haryana, but not as much as they could be.
- Genotyping-by-sequencing of a melon (Cucumis melo L.) germplasm collection from a secondary center of diversity highlights patterns of genetic variation and genomic features of different gene pools. Three subgroups, and that’s just in Puglia, the heel bit of Italy.
- Quantifying biodiversity losses due to human consumption: a global-scale footprint analysis. Food consumption is the single greatest driver of biodiversity loss, somewhere else.
- Old vegetable varieties: attitude, consumption behaviour and knowledge of German consumers. There’s a consumer segment in Germany that could be labelled “fanciers of old vegetable varieties,” apparently.
- Emerging oomycete threats to plants and animals. Be afraid.
- Ecological characteristics and in situ genetic associations for yield-component traits of wild Miscanthus from eastern Russia. Arctic sugarcane? It could happen.
- The city as a refuge for insect pollinators. It could happen.
- Sweat bees on hot chillies: provision of pollination services by native bees in traditional slash-and-burn agriculture in the Yucatán Peninsula of tropical Mexico. The milpa is pretty good refuge for bees already.