- 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.
Nibbles: ICARDA genebank, Mexican honeys, NWFP news, Schisandra, Swimming camels, Barley genome, Silly video, Tasty breeders, Tall maize, Praying for the prairie, Rosaceous breeding, Millet fair, Sesame entrepreneurs, Thai gardens, Apple resistance, Native Californians
- Latest on the ICARDA genebank from the author of The Profit of the Earth.
- Honey diversity in Mexico.
- Speaking of which, did we already point to the new, improved Non-wood Forest Products Newsletter?
- The schisandra berry is apparently helping save the panda. Yeah, I never heard of it either, but more power to its elbow.
- Make your day better by looking at pictures of aquatic camels.
- Oh, here we go, cue the endless stream of stories about how genomics will save beer.
- “In the last century, 94% of the world’s seed varieties have disappeared.” No, they bloody haven’t. Only linking to this for completeness.
- Breeders get into flavour. Because celebrity chefs.
- That’s one tall maize plant. No, but really tall.
- The Great Plains are in Great Trouble: “Hundreds of species call the prairie home… A cornfield, on the other hand, is a field of corn.”
- A project dedicated to the genetic improvement of US rosaceous crops. Love that word. Rosaceous.
- Eat those millets!
- Sesame opens doors in Tanzania. See what I did there?
- WorldVeg empowers women through gardening. I know how they feel. Well, kinda.
- Want a Forbidden Apple? You know you do. #resist
- “Accustomed to seeing crops planted in straight rows featuring one or a few different varieties, Muir and his European predecessors were not prepared to recognize this subtler form of horticulture. And so they viewed California Indians as lazily gathering the fat of a landscape they had hardly touched.”
Brainfood: Tomato chemicals, Photoperiod, Grain phenotyping, Hawaiian ag, Domestication primer, Symbionts, Turkish wheat, Yam bean diversity, Crop health, Walnut diversity, Agrobiodiversity theorising, Sea pigs, NERICA impacts, Nutrient production
- Multi-perspective evaluation of phytonutrients – Case study on tomato landraces for fresh consumption. Fancy maths proves different tomato varieties taste different.
- Adaptation to the Local Environment by Modifications of the Photoperiod Response in Crops. It’s all down to a few mutations in all crops.
- Evaluation of the SeedCounter, A Mobile Application for Grain Phenotyping. Seems like a lot of work to just be able to measure wheat seeds, but boys will have their toys.
- Indigenous Polynesian Agriculture in Hawaiʻi. Both intensive and extensive.
- How to make a domesticate. It takes a long time, and involves lots of genes.
- Symbiosis limits establishment of legumes outside their native range at a global scale. Non-symbiotic legumes have spread further than symbiotic ones into non-native areas.
- Wheat Landraces Currently Grown in Turkey: Distribution, Diversity, and Use. More than half of morphotypes (59%) lost since 1920 overall, but none in some areas.
- Ecotypic differentiation under farmers’ selection: Molecular insights into the domestication of Pachyrhizus Rich. ex DC. (Fabaceae) in the Peruvian Andes. Separate Amazonian and Andean lineages, and P. tuberosum arising from P. ahipa.
- Crop health and its global impacts on the components of food security. To better understand acute impacts, model systemic ones.
- Climate-Related Local Extinctions Are Already Widespread among Plant and Animal Species. About half of about 1000 species showed local extinction.
- Rethinking the history of common walnut (Juglans regia L.) in Europe: Its origins and human interactions. Expansion from glacial refugia, followed by human exploitation. Compare and contrast with Asia. Or read about the whole thing in AramcoWorld.
- Agrobiodiversity and a sustainable food future. Apparently all you need to do to support the “use of biological diversity in sustainable agricultural and food systems” is to recognize that there are 4 interconnected themes: (1) genetic resources, ecology and evolution; (2) governance policy, institutions and legal agreements; (3) food, nutrition, health and disease; and (4) global change drivers with social ecological interactions.
- Eastern Mediterranean Mobility in the Bronze and Early Iron Ages: Inferences from Ancient DNA of Pigs and Cattle. Anatolia to southeastern Europe and back to the Levant across the Bronze-Iron Age transition. The Sea Peoples had pigs?
- Contribution of improved rice varieties to poverty reduction and food security in sub-Saharan Africa. NERICA adoption increased annual per capita income by US$4 per year from 2000, despite yields going down a bit.
- Farming and the geography of nutrient production for human use: a transdisciplinary analysis. Need to try to maintain production diversity as farm size increases. But let Jess Fanzo explain it better.
Nibbles: Celebrity chef, Brazilian meeting & dessert, Citizen experiment, Phenotyping course, Fonio, Milpa, Broccoli nutrients, Biodiversity $$, Soybean history
- Alexis Soyer was apparently the first celebrity chef.
- EMBRAPA gets to grips with crop wild relatives, with a little help from their friends.
- Did they serve brigaidero, though?
- Take part in a crowd-sourced experiment on plant adaptation.
- And then go and find out how the experts do it.
- Will fonio‘s day ever come?
- Celebrating the milpa.
- Gotta eat your broccoli fresh for the full nutrient monty.
- Putting (yet another) value on biodiversity. This one by adding or subtracting a species to a grassland plot and seeing what happens to C sequestration.
- What price soybeans?
Brainfood: Slow Food, Runner bean diversity, Bamboo diversity, Istrian grapes, Smelly cheeses, Wild pseudocereals, Diversity & phenology, VAM diversity, Oases apocalypse, Wild wheat physiology, PepperHub, Bactrian camel diversity, Swiss livestock, CWR conservation, Tree database
- Developing radically-new meanings through the collaboration with radical circles: Slow Food as a platform for envisioning innovative meanings. Companies should collaborate with radicals. Presumably in order to turn them. #resist
- Unraveling agronomic and genetic aspects of runner bean (Phaseolus coccineus L.). At least we know what we don’t know.
- Total leaf crude protein, amino acid composition and elemental content in the USDA-ARS bamboo germplasm collections. If you want to use bamboo as feed, you need to choose among the 100-odd species very carefully.
- The Gene Collection of Autochthonous Wine Grape Varieties at the Institute as a Contribution to the Sustainable Development of Wine Growing and Viticulture in Istria. 3591 seems a hell of a lot, but wow.
- Phage Biodiversity in Artisanal Cheese Wheys Reflects the Complexity of the Fermentation Process. Modern methods kill a lot of phages.
- Setting conservation priorities for Argentina’s pseudocereal crop wild relatives. Go north, young CWR researcher!
- Flowering phenology shifts in response to biodiversity loss. Experimentally decreasing diversity in a California grassland advanced phenology.
- Activity, diversity and function of arbuscular mycorrhizae vary with changes in agricultural management intensity. No-till helps VAM, helps soils.
- Oases in Southern Tunisia: The End or the Renewal of a Clever Human Invention? I’m not hopeful.
- Physiological responses to drought stress in wild relatives of wheat: implications for wheat improvement. 4 species show promise.
- PepperHub, a Pepper Informatics Hub for the chilli pepper research community. Hot off the presses.
- Molecular diversity and phylogenetic analysis of domestic and wild Bactrian camel populations based on the mitochondrial ATP8 and ATP6 genes. The wild species is not the ancestor, and the domesticated species is a geographic mess.
- GenMon-CH: a Web-GIS application for the monitoring of Farm Animal Genetic Resources (FAnGR) in Switzerland. Upload data on your herd or flock, end up with a map of where the breed is most endangered.
- Stealing into the wild: conservation science, plant breeding and the makings of new seed enclosures. Ouch!
- GlobalTreeSearch – the first complete global database of tree species and country distributions. 60,065, about 10% crop wild relatives.