- Unexpected Diversity during Community Succession in the Apple Flower Microbiome. Could be important in disease management.
- Plant Tissue Culture: A Useful Measure for the Screening of Salt Tolerance in Plants. But lots of different ways to do it.
- Fisheries: Does catch reflect abundance? Some. But probably not enough. Here’s the industry spin. And the NY Times does a number on it.
- Plant-Pollinator Interactions over 120 Years: Loss of Species, Co-Occurrence and Function. Extinctions and phenological shifts have occurred, but the system has shown resilience. It is unlikely, however, to continue to do so.
- Wild Pollinators Enhance Fruit Set of Crops Regardless of Honey Bee Abundance. Don’t you sometimes wish titles left something to the imagination? NPR breaks it down for ya, but doesn’t add much to the title.
- Continental estimates of forest cover and forest cover changes in the dry ecosystems of Africa between 1990 and 2000. About 20 Mha of forest loss, not 34 Mha. Still too much, though. But how did FAO get it so wrong?
- Robustness and Strategies of Adaptation among Farmer Varieties of African Rice (Oryza glaberrima) and Asian Rice (Oryza sativa) across West Africa. Local varieties can scale out. And should be used in breeding.
- Genetic and life-history changes associated with fisheries-induced population collapse. Phenotypic changes during Eurasian perch Baltic Sea fisheries collapse could be evolution, but when you look at the genetics it looks more like immigration of unadapted interlopers. Which might be bad for recovery.
- Variable activation of immune response by quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa Willd.) prolamins in celiac disease. Quinoa may be gluten-free, but it can still give you grief, and some varieties are far worse than others.
- Social exchange and vegetative propagation: An untold story of British potted plants. It’s artificial selection, Jim, but not as we know it.
- Wheat Cultivar Performance and Stability between No-Till and Conventional Tillage Systems in the Pacific Northwest of the United States. Tested 21 cultivars for performance under late-planted no-till system and — guess what? — performance varied.
- Genetic diversity and structure in Asian native goat analyzed by newly developed SNP markers. They originated in W Asia, and then admixtured (admixed?) in the E to different extents. Yeah, I thought we knew that already too, but scientists gotta make a living.
- A Bountiful Harvest: Genomic Insights into Crop Domestication Phenotypes. The mutations that underpinned domestication came in all kinds of shapes and sizes. Like this one in maize, for example.
Nibbles: Guatemala, Burundi, Bees, LANSA, Moringa, Sorghum domestication, Coffee rust, Zambian rhinos
- The USDA is plugging its Atlas of Crop Wild Relatives in Guatemala. So we’ll plug our post about it from November 2011. And ask again: where’s Paraguay?
- The Social Life of Beans in Burundi is a tour-de-force. I can never get enough of informal seed systems, especially from people who live in them.
- And a similar sort of thing on okra. What’s gumbo without it?
- Today’s scary bee decline story. With extra buzz.
- CGIAR comes in for some stick over the insidious view and cunning logic of “Leveraging Agriculture for Nutrition in South Asia (LANSA)”. I couldn’t possibly comment (and CG probably won’t).
- Oh boy! Global Moringa Get-togethers! In India!
- Sorghum domestication in Sudan: earlier, and less uncertain, than before.
- BBC piece on the new outbreak of coffee rust in Central America. Where are the resistant varieties?
- Head of Kew’s MSB tracks rhinos. Well, someone has to.
Nibbles: UK horticulture funding, AVRDC, Biofortification, SRI debate, Stressed bees, Nutrient decline, Beneficial viruses, DNA for dummies, Chaffey, Cow genebank, Organic network
- For UK horticulturalists in need of cash. Wonder if that includes the rosemary collection.
- I’m pretty sure it doesn’t include AVRDC.
- Who would no doubt agree with Mark Lynas that “No-one disputes that a balanced and nutritionally-adequate diet is the best long-term solution to vitamin A deficiency and malnutrition in general.” And be as puzzled as the rest of us for the relative lack of funding for research on such a diet.
- A discussion of why mainstream agricultural science hasn’t got the message across about SRI, courtesy of Facebook. Yeah well, the whole concept of basing interventions on, you know, evidence, is not exactly mainstream. Just ask the balanced and nutritionally-adequate diet guys.
- Bees are stressed out, the poor things.
- Creative Commons graphs on changes in vegetable nutrient content.
- Not all plant viruses are bad.
- Pat Heslop-Harrison talks DNA, with his usual extraordinary fluency, from 11 mins in.
- Plant Cuttings! Everything from the botany of food to transcription factors for C4 photosynthesis.
- Cow genebank proposed.
- IFOAM gets a TIPI. Vandana Shiva no doubt ecstatic.
Nibbles: Gates & Slim, Aquino, Home genebank, Quinoa indigestion, Cornish pasties, Exotic vegetables, Funny cheeses, Leafsnap, Beekeeping
- Bigshots visit CIMMYT, miss opportunity to mention genebank. No, wait…
- Bigshot visits IRRI, including genebank.
- Yeah but who needs those anyway, you can make your own!
- Now the French want their say on quinoa.
- Speaking of the French, you think there is any horsemeat in Cornish pasties?
- “I grew up with zucchini, but I prefer the flavor and texture of angled luffa.”
- Gotta love the fact that there’s a thing called the Rogue Creamery.
- Missed the fact that Leafsnap had been named one of the top 10 science apps of 2012.
- Germans report on Italians helping Ethiopians. To keep bees. One suspects Ethiopians could teach Italians and Germans a thing or two about keeping bees, but that’s another story.
Brainfood: Introductions, Diversified farming systems, Breadfruit, Rice, Aquaculture threats, Arthropods in rice, Diverse landscapes, Diverse pollinators, Species re-introduction, Ecosystem function, Grapes, Prunus africana
- Increases in crop pests caused by Wasmannia auropunctata in Solomon Islands subsistence gardens. Law of Unintended Consequences takes its toll. Or does it? Discussion at Pestnet suggests the Little Fire Ant may not have been introduced as a biological control agent as suggested by the paper.
- A Social-Ecological Analysis of Diversified Farming Systems: Benefits, Costs, Obstacles, and Enabling Policy Frameworks. Special issue of Ecology and Society on DFS. That would be Diversified Farming Systems. Bottom line is that you need to understand both their ecology and their politics to make sense of them, and make them work for you.
- Morphological diversity in breadfruit (Artocarpus, Moraceae): insights into domestication, conservation, and cultivar identification. 221 accessions provide exactly those insights.
- The original features of rice (Oryza sativa L.) genetic diversity and the importance of within-variety diversity in the highlands of Madagascar build a strong case for in situ conservation. Farms are more diverse than villages, which are more diverse than regions, so it may not take that much to conserve a lot of diversity in situ.
- More rapid and severe disease outbreaks for aquaculture at the tropics: implications for food security. Driven by environmental factors, and will get worse with climate change. Strangely, breeding for resistance, and genetic diversity in general, not mentioned.
- Cultivation of Domesticated Rice Alters Arthropod Biodiversity and Community Composition. Wild rice fields have different, less diverse arthropod communities.
- Quantifying habitat-specific contributions to insect diversity in agricultural mosaic landscapes. Some of the different bits of diverse landscapes in Switzerland have unique insects, which is apparently not the case in other places.
- Synergistic effects of non-Apis bees and honey bees for pollination services. And you do need lots of different insects, at least for pollination.
- Earth observation: overlooked potential to support species reintroduction programmes. Translocation and introductions are fraught, but if you still want to do them…
- An improved model to predict the effects of changing biodiversity levels on ecosystem function. Basically, the contribution of species 1 with relative abundance A and species 2 with relative abundance B to ecosystem function is AxB to the power of θ. Can it be extended to ecosystem services, I wonder?
- Pinot blanc and Pinot gris arose as independent somatic mutations of Pinot noir. So that’s where they came from. Insights into “[o]enological aptitude”.
- Divergent pattern of nuclear genetic diversity across the range of the Afromontane Prunus africana mirrors variable climate of African highlands. Sheds light on the history of Afromontane regions.