- Evolution of the crop rhizosphere: impact of domestication on root exudates in tetraploid wheat (Triticum turgidum L.). Domestication and breeding have led to (probably adaptive) changes in root exudates.
- Threats from urban expansion, agricultural transformation and forest loss on global conservation priority areas. Vertebrate Biodiversity Hotspots are most threatened by all three factors. Plants too?
- Patterns and drivers of biodiversity–stability relationships under climate extremes. Species richness may not be enough to buffer ecosystems from extreme precipitations events. But a different metric would give a different result?
- Evaluating the environmental impacts of dietary recommendations. Adopting nationally recommended diets would help the environment.
- On the Use of Hedonic Price Indices to Understand Ecosystem Service Provision from Urban Green Space in Five Latin American Megacities. There’s an overall strong positive correlation between urban greenery and house prices, but it’s context-specific.
- Disease: A Hitherto Unexplored Constraint on the Spread of Dogs (Canis lupus familiaris) in Pre-Columbian South America. Yes, why are there no dogs in the Amazon?
- Children and Wild Foods in the Context of Deforestation in Rural Malawi. Fewer wild foods in more deforested sites, and fewer sold by children from better-off households. What of the nutrition outcomes, though?
- Biodiversity defrosted: unveiling non-compliant fish trade in ethnic food stores. About 40% of samples in Liverpool and Manchester mislabelled.
- Population viability analysis of the Crioula Lageano cattle. It’s going to be fine.
- The Kalanchoë genome provides insights into convergent evolution and building blocks of crassulacean acid metabolism. Next stop, CAM rice.
- Contribution of trees to the conservation of biodiversity and ecosystem services in agricultural landscapes. It depends. But what would those kids in Malawi say?
Nibbles: Millets galore, Human diversity & ag, Super farmers, Extinction is forever, Indian nutrition maps, Future Food competition, Banana viruses, Cassava in Brazil & Africa, Sugar book, Fairchild & Irma, Vegetable ROI, Embrapa beans, Certified coffee, Legal pot, Native American foods
- Today’s new genome is pearl millet. The most climate-smart of crops? Now, to process it more easily.
- Finger millet is not too bad either.
- Agriculture was good for human diversity, at least in Papua New Guinea. Elsewhere, maybe not so much.
- Julio Hancco Mamani grows 400 potato varieties up in the Andes (but how did it all start?). And Rahibai Soma Popere “15 varieties of rice, nine varieties of pigeon pea and sixty varieties of vegetables, besides many oil seeds” in Maharashtra.
- “West Bengal government encourages cultivation of extinct rice varieties.” Wait, what?
- Presumably not extinct like silphium.
- India’s first nutrition atlas will maybe tells us where more Rahibai Soma Poperes are most needed.
- Future Food includes seeds.
- Cleaning up bananas.
- Would love to have been on the “Brazilian Cassava Learning Journey.” Tanzania next?
- The bitter side of sugar.
- Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden damaged by Irma.
- Research on vegetables really pays off, vegetable researchers say.
- Brazilian bean catalog launched.
- Certifying coffee seeds.
- Pot next?
- Closely followed by Navajo tea.
Brainfood: Mycorrhizal diversity, Olive diversity, Teak diversity, Core software diversity, Cost-benefit, Frosty rye, CGIAR future, Portuguese beans, Improvement networks, Food sovereignty
- Historical biome distribution and recent human disturbance shape the diversity of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi. Proximity to tropical grasslands during the last glacial maximum makes for a large potential species pool, remoteness from human disturbance for the presence of a high percentage of that pool.
- The First Molecular Identification of an Olive Collection Applying Standard Simple Sequence Repeats and Novel Expressed Sequence Tag Markers. 59 genotypes among 370 trees.
- Worldwide translocation of teak—origin of landraces and present genetic base. The dryer part of the natural range has not really been used in plantations.
- GenoCore: A simple and fast algorithm for core subset selection from large genotype datasets. Better than MSTRAT, Core Hunter, and random sampling.
- Global economic trade-offs between wild nature and tropical agriculture. We can go ahead and cut down the Atlantic Forest. Wait, what?
- Exploring new alleles for frost tolerance in winter rye. Basically one allele, actually.
- Reforming the research policy and impact culture in the CGIAR: Integrating science and systemic capacity development. Let CGIAR be CGIAR.
- Improving global integration of crop research. Taking this to the next level. Which sounded a lot like the International Treaty’s Global Information System on PGRFA. Also, see above.
- Establishing the Bases for Introducing the Unexplored Portuguese Common Bean Germplasm into the Breeding World. 37 accessions had 100% of the diversity of 175 accessions, which were mainly hybrids between the two main genepools. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that before.
- Plant diversity increases with the strength of negative density dependence at the global scale. Janzen-Connell were right, it’s natural enemies that explain the tropical-temperate diversity pattern. With video goodness.
- Local food sovereignty for global food security? Highlighting interplay challenges. “…scaling up of food sovereignty will not necessarily lead to wider sustainability and food security outcomes.”
Crop wild relatives on Costing the Earth on the BBC
Botanist James Wong investigates the links between global warming and the rate at which crops are able to adapt and evolve to rapidly changing conditions.
That includes how crop wild relatives can help.
The money quote:
The first rule of intelligent tinkering is you don’t throw away any of the parts just because you’re not sure what they’re for.
Brainfood: Dope diversity, Potato chips, Conservation costing, Island breeding systems, Indus civilization cereals, Drone phenotyping, Wild rice in Asia, Wild rice & Native Americans, Pearl millet temperature, Climate change & fruit/veg
- Cannabis Domestication, Breeding History, Present-day Genetic Diversity, and Future Prospects. The traditional landraces are being contaminated and need urgent collection and evaluation by dedicated professionals.
- Cold sweetening diversity in Andean potato germplasm from Argentina. 5 out of 48 Andigena landraces make good chips.
- Considering cost alongside the effectiveness of management in evidence-based conservation: A systematic reporting protocol. Here comes the metadata. No excuse now.
- Self-compatibility is over-represented on islands. 66% vs 41% in Asteraceae, Brassicaceae and Solanaceae. Any crop wild relatives in the list?
- Cereals, calories and change: exploring approaches to quantification in Indus archaeobotany. Millet may not have been as important as is generally thought.
- High-Throughput Phenotyping of Sorghum Plant Height Using an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle and Its Application to Genomic Prediction Modeling. A near-infrared, green and blue (NIR-GB) camera on a drone gives pretty good results compared to a person with a tape measure, and is much more fun.
- Asian wild rice is a hybrid swarm with extensive gene flow and feralization from domesticated rice. No such thing as completely wild Asian rice.
- The dispute over wild rice: an investigation of treaty agreements and Ojibwe food sovereignty. Not wild rice at all, but what’s been happening to it might be a violation of the White Pine Treaty with the Ojibwe.
- Quantifying pearl millet response to high temperature stress: thresholds, sensitive stages, genetic variability and relative sensitivity of pollen and pistil. The problem is the pistils.
- Effect of environmental change on yield and quality of fruits and vegetables: two systematic reviews and projections of possible health effects. Bad for yield, good for nutritional quality.