- Colombia plants a bunch of peach palms. Hope they had some genetic diversity in there.
- Crop wild relative can tell you where diamonds are.
- Africa might need better seeds.
- Bangladesh certainly does.
- The black locust made America. The tree, not the insect.
- Another pean to agrobiodiversity.
- Towards a Research Agenda for Global Food and Nutrition Security: meeting at Expo 2015 organized by the EU. It’s today, though, and this is the first we hear of it. Sorry. Will genebanks even get mentioned? Well, if this tweet is from that meeting, it seems not.
- Cutting down forest bad for more than trees. How many crop and livestock wild relatives endangered by deforestation?
- Cubans ate cultivated plants a thousand years earlier than thought.
Nibbles: Food supplies, Food fotos, Forest foods, Diverse foods, Caribbean cassava, Wild foods, Expo 2015, Gates & SDGs, Nanoparticles
- What the World Eats: The Infographic.
- What the World Eats: The Photo Competition.
- What the World Doesn’t Eat: Forest Foods.
- What the World Should Eat More Of: The Presentation.
- What Grenada Eats: Cassava
- What Christopher McCandless Should Not Have Eaten: Not ODAP After All?
- Gulf states big stars in Milan. So that’s all right then.
- Gates Foundation really doesn’t like the SDGs.
- Boffins find promiscuous Phytophthora killer. Breeders surrender.
Dam the genetic resources, full speed ahead
Global Forest Watch now has a dam dataset, covering 50 major river basins. Here’s what it looks like:
You can mash it up online with various forest datasets, but you can also download it as a kml. Which of course means you can mash it up with your own dataset. That’s what I’ve done here with wild rice from Cambodia. The white arrows are dams, most of them either planned or under construction, the yellow dots samples of wild Oryza according to Genesys.
You’ll notice a few dams with few or no nearby specimens. Off the top of my head, those would seem to be places where collecting might be in order, before the disruption goes too far. But what do the rice experts out there think?
LATER: Seems I might be on to something…
@AgroBioDiverse @RiceResearch @BrianFLloyd And not just rice of course. Yes, I would expect a serious consequence.
— Mike Jackson OBE (@mikejackson1948) May 5, 2015
Nibbles: CWR gaps, Genebanks vid, Landrace cuisine, Perennial rice, High-tech evaluation, Egyptian cure, Weird tuber, Aroids news, Tibet transition, Worms & development, Hybrid artemisia, Sea potato, Grape microbes, Seed book, Seychelles parks, Brosimum hype, Kenya & bamboo, Tea & CC, Extinction and CC, Nutrition paradox
- CIAT crop wild relatives team announces 3 new papers on gaps in ex situ collections: potato, sweet potato & pigeonpea. Take a break, people, please.
- And CIAT genebank features in nice video on why we need genebanks. So also the IRRI genebank, which is relevant to the next Nibble. We do joined-up nibbling here.
- Fine dining with Filipino rice landraces. Go Manny!
- None of those rice landraces are perennial. Yet. If they ever are, it’ll be due to a wild relative.
- Fusarium head blight resistance in wheat dissected using a synchrotron. Avengers assemble!
- Oxyrhynchus papyrus identifies hangover cure. Or so the Daily Mail says, so, you know…
- Oh wow, the Mail is definitely on a botanical roll, now they’re all over a Kardashian-shaped tuber.
- New Edible Aroids Newsletter. Nothing Kim-shaped about these tubers.
- Wheat and barley replaced millet in E Tibet around 2000 BC after cooling period. This going into reverse now, I wonder?
- Some biodiversity you don’t want, trust me.
- Speaking of unwelcome biodiversity, there’s a new hope in the fight against malaria: hybrid artemisia.
- More on that potato that the Dutch are growing in sea water. Like they have a choice.
- Microbes are part of terroir.
- Q&A with The Triumph of Seeds author.
- The coco-de-mer is a pretty triumphant seed.
- You say ramòn nut, I say Maya nut.
- Kenya needs bamboo. Says the International Network for Bamboo & Rattan. Wow, two active crop networks in today’s Nibbles.
- Yesterday it was arabica that was in trouble, today tea. Damn you, climate change.
- They’re the lucky ones: they may be in trouble, but they’re not going extinct…
- More production does not automatically mean less stunting. Damn you, real world.
Nibbles: Gender myths, Cabbage myth, Deforestation, Urban ag, School gardens, Avocado disease, Tourism & conservation, African trees, European biofuels
- Hoary zombie gender myths bite the dust. Wish the same could be said of agrobiodiversity myths…
- The first cabbage, according to the ancient Greeks. A myth we can all get behind.
- WWF maps deforestation hotspots. Like the whole of Sumatra.
- Profits not the (only) point of urban farming.
- Maintaining food culture by gardening in a Native American community. See what I mean?
- After citrus greening, now comes laurel wilt. Poor Florida.
- Biodiversity conservation through tourism in Latin America. Including agrobiodiversity?
- The trees and shrubs of mopane woodlands, illustrated.
- European biofuels hit the buffers.