- 17 years of data confirm fears of bee decline.
- Slideshow on Egyptian Deserts Genebank; prepare to be astounded.
- Slideshow on US National Plant Germplasm System; prepare to be even more astounded.
- Livestock and climate change, a background paper from ILRI.
- “Most new farmland comes from cutting tropical forest.” The good news: it’s corporate, so can be pressured to stop.
Nibbles: Biotech to the rescue, Chinese horses, Soybean carotenoids, CropMobs, Nutrition, Coffee pests, Varroa, Berries, NUS
- Genejockeys say they have sorted that global food supply problem everybody’s been so antsy about lately. No, wait, maybe it’s this.
- China has 23 indigenous horse breeds. At least.
- Latest crop to get the orange treatment is soybean.
- Diverse ways of doing agriculture: Could CropMobs go global?
- Choose foods, not nutrients. Heck, yes.
- Globally warmed beetles threatening your coffee crops? Bring on biodiversity!
- Brit breeds bees for better grooming.
- How to get the most out of your wild blueberries. Maybe we should tell Medvedev?
- Emerging Crops is a new NUS project, and it has a website.
Nibbles: Cryocourse, Pollination stats, Corn domestication
- Bioversity and NBPGR India offering course on cryopreservation.
- Scientia Pro Publica #35 blog carnival is up, with bees factchecked up the wazoo.
- Big long post helps understand corn domestication dates in Chaco Canyon.
Nibbles: Trojan Horse? Farmer preferences, Yucca moths, Bees, GM bananas, Coffee
- This is not a Trojan Horse. Madcap agrobiodiversity antics in Abruzzo, Italy. No, I don’t get it either.
- Farmers are willing to forego some extra income or yield to obtain a more stable and environmentally adaptable crop variety. They are? Someone tell the Nabobs.
- Yucca moths and yuccas; an astonishing evolutionary story.
- Bee research gets USD1.5 million for a big database. Hope it helps.
- “GM bananas could cut blindness, anaemia in East Africa.” Because nothing else will?
- Coffee, a history.
Nibbles: Plant breeding book, Ug99, NGS, Monitoring, Genetic diversity and productivity, Adaptive evolution, Amaranthus, Nabhan, Herbarium databases, Pepper, Shade coffee and conservation, Apples, Pathogen diversity, Phytophthora
- Book on history of plant breeding reviewed.
- Rust never sleeps.
- Ask not what next generation sequencing can do for you.
- Long-term datasets in biodiversity research. Nothing about genetic diversity though. Bummer.
- And genetic diversity is important, is it? Yep, it increases productivity, at least in Arabidopsis.
- No evidence of adaptive evolution in plants. What? Surely some mistake? I’m serious. And don’t call me Shirley.
- The latest from Worldwatch on African leafy veggies. Again, some links would have been nice.
- And Worldwatch also interviews Gary Nabhan on Vavilov.
- You can browse Tropicos specimens in Google Earth.
- Using pepper to protect stored rice.
- More evidence of the goodness of shade coffee.
- The diversity of Bosnian apples.
- Mammal plus bird species richness explains 72% of country-to-country variation in the number of human pathogens. Diversity begets diversity. But which way does the causality go?
- Phytophthora infestans in Estonia: “…higher proportion of metalaxyl resistant isolates from large conventional farms than from small conventional farms or from organic farms.” Metalaxyl is a fungicide.