- You can monitor carbon dioxide from fossil fuels by analyzing wine (and maize leaves for that matter).
- Yes, we have no acorns.
- “Salt is sort of a diversified farming system.”
- “There’s a lot to learn from the past and how Native cultures have gardened“
- The end of the mustang?
- Urbanization and biodiversity conservation.
- Convicts conserve cows.
- Freezing technique opens door to commercialization of Canarium odontophyllum in Sarawak.
- Zero Mile Diet Seed Kit.
Nibbles: Info-fest, Medicinals, Wiliwili, Fish, Salinity
- 10,000,000 pages of biodiversity: among them 84 articles on agriculture.
- The road to scientific expertise for Maryam Imbumi began with a stomach ache.
- It’s wasp versus wasp to save native wiliwili.
- Domesticating big fish in the Amazon. Really big.
- Indian institute churning out salt-tolerant varieties.
Overexploiting crop wild relatives?
One of the seven plants studied in a recent IUCN report on overexploitation of wild medicinal plants in India is in a genus (Dioscorea) with a number of cultivated species. How many wild medicinal plants worldwide could also be classed as crop wild relatives?
Nibbles: Radishes, Fungi, Genomics, Bagel, Eels, Barack Hussein, Pomegranate
- Vavilov does radishes.
- “How would you describe the smell and taste of a fresh white truffle?“
- “The gene … is in an identity crisis.”
- “The basic roll-with-a-hole concept is centuries old.”
- “He slid her gently into a nylon sack and hung her from a scale on which she clocked two kilograms, then slid her out and into the V of a varnished plywood measuring board, where she lay quietly, like a metre-long slab of tenderloin.”
- “Activists” buttonhole Obama.
- The Afghan pomegranate to hit supermarket shelves.
Mine’s a decaff
We’re always on the look-out for examples of the financial value of germplasm collections which don’t involve some obscure and faraway disease, however nasty. So it was really nice to come across a great story about the search for naturally low-caffeine coffee, and in the Wall Street Journal no less. Coincidentally, there was also a blog post yesterday about the wild coffees of Madagascar. ((Yes, dear reader, we nibbled both these things yesterday, but I thought, on reflection, that they were worth a bit more than that.)) Some of the many species found on that island are known to have low caffeine levels, but “[a]ttempts to transfer the caffeine-free property from wild coffee species of Madagascar, which produce an inferior beverage, to C. arabica have failed owing to a strong genetic barrier.”
LATER: I wonder if the recent Korean “land-grab” in Madagascar will have an effect on wild coffees and other interesting endemics.