- Could teff or millets topple wheat, maize and rice? Anyone for unintended consequences?
- Not if superior models lead to bigger wheat harvests. ’Cos that’s all it takes.
- That and a good book: Yield Gains in Major U.S. Field Crops.
- Did somebody mention models? Vorarlberger Bergkäse is a model cheese, and “The rind is the boundary layer between a cheese and its environment”. Welcome to the cheese microbiome.
- What’s the difference between a wine grape and a table grape? Simple: Pectic-{beta}(1,4)-galactan, extensin and arabinogalactan-protein epitopes.
- Bee biodiversity results in mo’ bigger blueberries. Now to make use of that.
- Seed policy wonks – you know who you are – will thrill to IFPRI’s new report: The seed industry in Pakistan.
- So how does that square with the Financial Express of Bangladesh’s discovery that “Agro biodiversity can improve nutrition and health”?
- How to make baobab juice. Time to edit those factsheets.
Brainfood: Niche and range limits, Grassland diversity drivers, Pollinator research bias, Livestock systems, Seed longevity gene, Apple origins, Amaranthus in Mexico, Chinese medicinal orchids, Seed longevity, Fitness tradeoffs, Lentil evaluation
- Are species’ range limits simply niche limits writ large? A review of transplant experiments beyond the range. Meta-analysis shows dispersal constrains geographic distribution but extends altitudinal. Biotic interactions important at low elevations and latitudes.
- Herbivores and nutrients control grassland plant diversity via light limitation. Nutrients bad, herbivores good for grassland diversity.
- Economic and ecological implications of geographic bias in pollinator ecology in the light of pollinator declines. Half the data come from 5 countries. Nuff said.
- Integrated crop and livestock systems in Western Europe and South America: A review. Market logic has driven crops and livestock apart, but it should drive them back together again.
- ARABIDOPSIS THALIANA HOMEOBOX25 Uncovers a Role for Gibberellins in Seed Longevity. Seed longevity gene found. No word on whether giberellin treatment can prolong seed life in genebanks. Yet.
- Molecular-level and trait-level differentiation between the cultivated apple (Malus×domestica Borkh.) and its main progenitor Malus sieversii. Status of M. sieversii as main progenitor confirmed. Always good to have more data.
- Adaptation of Cultivated Amaranth (Amaranthus spp.) and Their Wild Relatives in Mexico. One of the wild species could be a source of adaptation for the cultivated under climate change.
- Eat your orchid and have it too: a potentially new conservation formula for Chinese epiphytic medicinal orchids. Nature reserves and cultivation on farms not enough. What you need is “restoration-friendly cultivation.”
- A continental-scale study of seed lifespan in experimental storage examining seed, plant, and environmental traits associated with longevity. Australian seeds are somewhat longer-lived than those from other regions. But there’s plenty of variation, some of which can be explained by different features of the seeds, plants and the specific environment where they grow.
- Inclusive fitness in agriculture. Plants and their root symbionts can get along even better together, with a little help from human selection.
- Genetic diversity analysis for quantitative traits in lentil (Lens culinaris medik.) germplasm. NBPGR seem to be on an evaluation blitz. More power to them. Hope to see the data online soon.
Nibbles: Rural income sources, Medicinal trees, Saffron, Biofuel trees, Trout genome, Maize & drugs in Mexico, Bee-keeping, Urban ag, Food security, Jackfruit, SDG2015
- Natural areas just as important for rural incomes as crops.
- Because of things like medicinal plants, among others.
- Not if the crop was saffron, though. Or multi-purpose biofuels?
- Trout gets the genome treatment. I prefer it grilled with a little butter and parsley.
- High maize prices good for one thing. Wanna guess?
- Guerrilla bee-keepers in the Rust Belt.
- Maybe they’ll be discussed in tomorrow’s tweetathon: Urban Food Security +SocialGood.
- Brussels sprouts too, maybe: it’s urban agriculture, Jim, but not as we know it.
- Another view on NatGeo’s five steps to food security. (Here’s Luigi’s.)
- The key thing NatGeo left out: jackfruit.
- Well, that, and multi-stakeholder partnerships. Of course.
Nibbles: Tomato colour, INBio demise, Specimens, Plant lore, Ancient chickens, Edible flowers, Urban veg, Trees & nutrition
- Deconstructing the colour of tomatoes. h/t @kctomato
- INBio folds? Or (h/t Jacob) government takes responsibility?
- Discussion on whether natural history specimens are necessary.
- So there’s a place where you can record your plant lore. No word on whether that’s linked to specimens.
- Yellow skin in chickens is a recent trait. Specimens involved. Part of that PNAS special feature on domestication.
- What have bees ever done for us?
- Edible flowers not just for pansies.
- Australia funds World Veg to research urban veg in Africa.
- Remember how we included in Brainfood a few months back a paper linking tree cover with dietary diversity and fruit/veg consumption in Africa? Well, here’s the PowerPoint.
Brainfood: Wheat resistance, Wild barley regeneration, Barley improvement, Maize regeneration, Seed pathogens, Colombian rice management, Malawi diversity & nutrition, Modelling pollinators, Women & seeds, Vietnam development, European agrobiodiversity, CIP sweet potato goes to China, American NUS
- Gene bank of sources of spring wheat resistance to leaf-stem diseases. Crop wild relatives to the rescue.
- Evolutionary History of Wild Barley (Hordeum vulgare subsp. spontaneum) Analyzed Using Multilocus Sequence Data and Paleodistribution Modeling. Recently collected material gives different results to genebank accessions, suggesting geneflow during ex situ maintenance?
- Barley genetic variation: implications for crop improvement. “Contemporary plant breeders now benefit from publicly available user-friendly databases providing genotypic and phenotypic information on large numbers of barley accessions.” Barley Genebank Database Heaven? Should talk to the guys above?
- Detection of genetic integrity of conserved maize (Zea mays L.) germplasm in genebanks using SNP markers. Oh crap, that problem with ex situ barley maintenance is an issue with maize as well.
- Incidence of Seed-Borne Mycoflora in Wheat and Rice Germplasm. Oh, I give up, genebanks are doomed.
- Ethnophytopathology: Rice Fields Free of Diseases, from the Culture of Producers in a Nuquí, Chocó-Colombia´s Community. Careful placement of fields in the landscape ensures they don’t get diseases. Who needs genebanks and breeders?
- Farm production diversity is associated with greater household dietary diversity in Malawi: Findings from nationally representative data. Yeah, but settle down, it’s kinda complicated.
- Landscape fragmentation and pollinator movement within agricultural environments: a modelling framework for exploring foraging and movement ecology. Don’t know how your set-asides and whatnots are going to affect pollinators? Well, now there’s a spatially explicit model for that. Which could perhaps be applied to…
- Complex effects of fragmentation on remnant woodland plant communities of a rapidly urbanizing biodiversity hotspot. Would be so interesting to know if there were any socioconomically useful plants (including crop wild relatives) among these remnants.
- Gender, Seeds and Biodiversity. Whether in Pennsylvania or Peru, it’s women that save seeds. (This is from an old book, which has presumably just been digitized, hence its appearance in my RSS feed.)
- Land Use Dynamics, Climate Change, and Food Security in Vietnam: A Global-to-local Modeling Approach. Agriculture is at risk. Better collect all that germplasm. Right? Right?
- Responses of plants, earthworms, spiders and bees to geographic location, agricultural management and surrounding landscape in European arable fields. Mineral N and pesticides not good for agricultural biodiversity. Too bad you can’t really conserve earthworms ex situ.
- Identification and evaluation of major quality characters of introduced sweet potato germplasm resources. 4 accessions out of 32 from CIP were likely to prove very useful, for different reasons. I’d say that was pretty good.
- Conservation and use of genetic resources of underutilized crops in the Americas – A continental analysis. Some underused crops are more underused than others, but policies don’t help any of them much.
- And this week’s theme, I’ve just realized, somewhat belatedly, is the complementarity of ex situ and in situ conservation. No, really, go back and check. And it was purely by chance too.