- Dietary diversity, food security, and development projects in low- and middle-income contexts: Findings from 24 countries. Development projects are most effective at improving dietary diversity and food security when they bring together agriculture, nutrition and local communities.
- Enhancing farmers’ access to neglected crop seeds for healthy diets in a changing climate: six recommendations for policy action. Improving farmers’ access to opportunity crop seeds requires coordinated action across seed systems, with researchers, policymakers, seed producers and farming communities all playing complementary roles.
- The effects of seed policies, laws and regulations on farmers’ ability to access and use diverse, locally adapted farmers’ varieties and landraces. Seed policies shape collaboration between farmers, communities and formal seed systems, and regulations can either enable or constrain the exchange of locally adapted varieties that keeps agricultural diversity alive.
- Studying vanishing dietary diversity before it is lost: the World Diet Initiative. The World Diet Initiative brings together nutrition science, ecology and cultural knowledge to understand disappearing food traditions, showing that protecting dietary diversity requires collaboration across disciplines and communities.
- The Spanish Network of Genetic Conservation Units: a cooperative tool for the conservation and sustainable use of forest genetic resources under a changing environment. The Spanish Network of Genetic Conservation Units show how sharing expertise and responsibilities can strengthen forest conservation.
- Strengthening national genebanks through genomics and regional collaboration: Lessons from Latin America and the Caribbean. A regional community of practice is helping national genebanks overcome technical and institutional barriers through shared genomic approaches, turning isolated collections into connected systems for conserving and using crop diversity.
Mind the conservation gap
In the interest of completeness, I feel it incumbent upon me to complement the post on gap analysis for crop diversity conservation that I put up a few days ago with a couple of additional links.
The Crop Trust and FAO elearning Academy have collaborated on a course on the Global Crop Conservation Strategies that includes a lesson on “Crop coverage assessments and gap analysis.”
And the Crop Trust has also made available a “Curriculum of an online lesson for gap analysis.”
So there’s really no excuse for not doing your own gap analysis, is there? And add to the storied history of the field.
A circleback of academies
To the Genebank Academy and Landscape Academy we should now add the Center for Plant Conservation’s Rare Plant Academy. I wonder if we can think of a collective noun for this proliferation? My initial suggestion is in the title.
Oh what a time to be alive.
JSTOR in a pickle with Jeremy
From Jeremy’s latest newsletter. To which of course you should subscribe. You’ll see he mentions Charles Darwin right up front, which allows me to link to a new course based on teaching materials created by Darwin’s Cambridge menor, Prof. John Stevens Henslow.
Plant of the Month from JSTOR is the cucumber. As usual for this series, there’s a ton of fascinating information and links, from the compilation of cats confronted by cucumbers to their inspiration of one of Charles Darwin’s lesser-known books.
Why, though, cool as a cucumber? In some sense it seems obvious that the cucumber is simply well-flavoured wateriness most available during summer’s heat. Could it, really, have prevented sweating? And while people swear by the beneficial effects of a good, thick slice on the eyes as a rejuvenator, reducer of puffiness, etc., etc., there doesn’t seem to be any good evidence that a cucumber is better than, say, a used tea bag or wet cotton wool. JSTOR doesn’t even mention the practice.
Allow me, please, a quibble. JSTOR’s caption for its first image … is “Two dill cucumbers. Watercolour painting by a Chinese artist”. Fair enough, that is how it is labelled at its source. But surely a cucumber on the vine cannot be a dill cucumber until it has been brined and fermented, with dill.
And if that’s not confusing enough, try a deep dive into cucurbit names, an episode from 2016.
A home for genebank training at last?
Long-time readers will know that I regularly try to roundup training opportunities in crop diversity conservation, basically because nobody else does it. Well, maybe I can stop doing that now.
Yes, it’s true, the Crop Trust has launched a Genebank Academy, which aggregates information on online training courses. Have they missed some? Let me know.
And completeness compels me to add that there is also a Landscape Academy. Though unfortunately none of the courses seem to feature genebanks. But then, I’m not sure that any of the genebank courses featured landscapes.
LATER: Ok, but where to put the course Seed Systems, Crop Conservation and Genetic Diversity in December 2026?