- A Molecular and Fitness Evaluation of Commercially Available versus Locally Collected Blue Lupine Lupinus perennis L. Seeds for Use in Ecosystem Restoration Efforts. Commercial seed sources can be dodgy, and that’s a problem.
- Comparison of responses to drought stress of 100 wheat accessions and landraces to identify opportunities for improving wheat drought resistance. 20 Balkan landraces seemed to be more drought tolerant than 80 accessions sourced globally.
- Towards next-generation biodiversity assessment using DNA metabarcoding. You gotta be kidding me, metabarcoding? Will they be applying it to soils? Yep.
- Selection and microevolution of coat pattern are cryptic in a wild population of sheep. You need to look at the genes.
- Will they buy it? The potential for marketing organic vegetables in the food vending sector to strengthen vegetable safety: A choice experiment study in three West African cities. Not enough.
- Plant diversity improves protection against soil-borne pathogens by fostering antagonistic bacterial communities. Chalk another one up to diversity. Did they say soil?
- Local scale patterns of gene flow and genetic diversity in a crop–wild–weedy complex of sorghum (Sorghum bicolor (L.) Moench) under traditional agricultural field conditions in Kenya. Mostly crop-to-wild, which could be a problem if transgenics are ever grown. If.
- Adaptation with gene flow across the landscape in a dune sunflower… is leading to “ecological” speciation.
Nibbles: All singing and dancing, FAO meets Big Data, Clone this, Patent nonsense, Frozen fish
- Fisherfolk of the Amazon landed on film. But do they sing about it? (And it’s not just an Amazon thing, this dancing and singing about agrobiodiversity. Not by any means.) And should they be doing more slashing-and-burning?
- FAO to put all its data in one basket. But including AnGR? WIEWS? One asks more in hope than expectation.
- One of the many challenges of vegetatively propagated crops (like potatoes): rapid multiplication. (Well, they could always do an SNP-based tetraploid map of the damn things, couldn’t they.) No such problems with seeds, of course.
- There’s been a rapid increase in the patenting of adaptation-related traits, and the private sector in industrialized countries is mainly responsible. Well there’s a surprise. But was that discussed at the CCAFS meeting on breeding objectives for Africa? And it’s just as well to remember that it’s not just breeding that’s needed. Oh, but by the way, you better grab those adaptations while you can…
- Regional SE Asian fish genebank proposed. That I’d love to see. Maybe they could share germplasm with, I dunno, Chicago? And not just.
Nibbles: Genomic data, Seed porn, Ancient Amazonian ag, Genebanks Down Under, Climate data porn, Fiber in Maine, REDD+ at the CBD, Colony Collapse Disorder, Chili porn, Seed systems
- GBIF makes its move.
- Homaging the seed.
- Learning sustainability from old Amazonian farmers. Really old. Really, really old.
- Yet another Aussie genebank. Or maybe the same one, I’ve lost track. And interest.
- Where climate data comes from.
- Maine’s fiber community, what, exposed? Unveiled? Uncovered? And similar from Bolivia.
- REDD+ will save us all.
- Don’t crack open the mead to celebrate the solution to colony collapse disorder just yet.
- All things Capsicum on one handy website.
- Whole bunch of policy briefs on African seed systems. Don’t know if I’ll ever have the time to read through the lot, but cursory perusal suggests the following bottom line: the market can’t do it all by itself.
Nibbles: Ag history, Kuk, Vegetables in PNG, Tonka beans, Bio-villages
- Cambridge University summarizes the 10,000-year journey “from foraging to farming”.
- A journey that’s still taking place at the Kuk Early Agricultural World Heritage Site in Papua New Guinea.
- Where researchers are working with farmers to see which vegetables grow best where.
- Tonka beans (Dipteryx odorata) are the foundation of a conservation programme in Venezuela.
- Bio-villages in Bangladesh, “to improve food security and increase the supply of nutritionally rich food”. Supported by IRRI!
Brainfood: Dietary diversity, Diversity and diseases, Soil IK, Insect symbionts, Rhizobia, Wild lettuce, Tree genetic erosion, Pre-domestication barley, Strampelli
- Relating dietary diversity and food variety scores to vegetable production and socio-economic status of women in rural Tanzania. Dietary diversity was all too often alarmingly low, and when it was it was associated with seasonal fluctuations in the production and collecting of vegetables. But a more varied diet need not necessarily be healthier, so more procedural sophistication will be necessary in follow-up studies.
- A risk-minimizing argument for traditional crop varietal diversity use to reduce pest and disease damage in agricultural ecosystems of Uganda. For Musa and beans, more varietal diversity meant less damage and less variation in damage.
- Exploring farmers’ local knowledge and perceptions of soil fertility and management in the Ashanti Region of Ghana. Soils which farmers described as being more fertile were, ahem, more fertile.
- Population genetics of beneficial heritable symbionts. Of insects, that is. Important because they can confer protection from natural enemies, among other things. They behave a bit, but not entirely, like beneficial nuclear mutations.
- Widespread fitness alignment in the legume–rhizobium symbiosis. There are no cheaters.
- Genetic polymorphism in Lactuca aculeata populations and occurrence of natural putative hybrids between L. aculeata and L. serriola. Not much diversity in Israel, surprisingly. But isozymes?
- Meta-Analysis of Susceptibility of Woody Plants to Loss of Genetic Diversity through Habitat Fragmentation. The standard story — that trees suffer less genetic erosion because they are long-lived — is apparently wrong, even for wind pollinated trees.
- Large-scale cereal processing before domestication during the tenth millennium cal BC in northern Syria. “This was a community dedicated to the systematic production of food from wild cereals.”
- Nazareno Strampelli, the ‘Prophet’ of the green revolution. Before Norman, there was Nazareno.
- The memory remains: application of historical DNA for scaling biodiversity loss. Historical collections of salmon scales reveal many connections between modern evolutionary significant units (ESUs) in the Columbia River and old ones; but also, intriguingly, some differences.