- 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.
Faux wild rice in peril
I’m not saying it’s the most important thing about it, but that oil pipeline that is planned for Minnesota will go straight through lakes which are sacred to the local Native American peoples, and which generate about 50% of the world’s annual harvest of handpicked wild rice (which is Zizania, not Oryza, but still).
Nibbles: Viking dope, Garden survey, Ancient olive press, Proposal writing, Nice figures, Old garden books, Chestnuts, Cannibalism, Saving coffee, Vanilla history, Seed book, Spanish brassica
- Vikings got high.
- “How can you and your garden help us find out more about the global biodiversity associated with the plants in gardens?” Here’s how.
- The oldest olive press in Anatolia.
- “The Mistake: Writing a proposal that showcased knowledge rather than addressing the audience’s needs.” Indeed.
- The Solution: cool downloads from Gapminder.
- The only surviving illustrated Old English herbal. And, from several centuries later, a medieval book on how gardens will save you.
- AramcoWorld on my favourite nut.
- Cannibalism is a choice.
- One kick-ass botanist.
- Saving Ethiopia’s coffee forests. Nah, let’s just map the genome.
- Vanilla has dark side.
- The Profit of the Earth: cool new book on seeds, dark side and all.
- Remember my little trip to the Spanish genebank? What they’re doing on brassica.
Plants of the World Online is online
Great to see the launch of Kew’s Plants of the World Online portal.
In 2015, the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew launched its first Science Strategy establishing its vision to document and understand global plant and fungal diversity and their uses, bringing authoritative expertise to bear on the critical challenges facing humanity today. The Science Strategy also committed Kew to delivering nine strategic outputs with the overarching aim to disseminate Kew’s scientific knowledge of plants and fungi to maximize its impact in science, education, conservation policy and management. The Plants of the World Online portal (POWO), is one of the nine strategic outputs and its aim is to enable users to access information on all the world’s known seed-bearing plants by 2020…
…Ultimately, POWO will become a single point of access for authoritative plant species information, a multi-dimensional catalogue of plant life, including information on identification, distribution, traits, conservation, molecular phylogenies and uses. The codebase is open source and Kew hopes to support existing partner networks to set up their own portals, creating a distributed network of botanical data hubs. POWO aims to become a resource that has global coverage which can empower and inform citizens, policy makers, conservationists and farmers everywhere, about the importance of plants and fungi to life. In addition, a key function of POWO is to ensure that Kew’s floristic data can be harvested and ingested by the World Flora Online (WFO) portal enabling Kew to support the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation (GSPC) Target 1 2020.
And speaking of harvesting and ingesting, it even has crops! As it develops, I do hope it will include links to genebank and botanical garden collections.
Oh, and since I’m on Kew, don’t forget this year’s State of the World’s Plants Symposium is coming up. Last year there was a section on crop wild relatives. Nothing so agricultural on this occasion, but lots of interesting topics nevertheless.
Brainfood: Banana identification, Donkey domestication, Mouse domestication, African cattle, Pig domestication, Biofuels, Biofortification, Genomics for breeding, Species movement, Crop diversity double, N fixation, Ag commercialization models, Wild beans, Brassica domestication, Teaching biodiversity
- Molecular and cytological characterization of the global Musa germplasm collection provides insights into the treasure of banana diversity. 16% of 1500 accessions need taxonomic verification. Could have been much worse.
- Why the Donkey Did Not Go South: Disease as a Constraint on the Spread of Equus asinus into Southern Africa. Gap in distribution between Kenya and southern Africa until colonial times probably down to trypanosomiasis.
- Origins of house mice in ecological niches created by settled hunter-gatherers in the Levant 15,000 y ago. Hunter gatherers inadvertently domesticated the mouse.
- The genome landscape of indigenous African cattle. Now we know where the genes for heat tolerance and tick resistance can be found, and it’s where you’d think.
- Insights into early pig domestication provided by ancient DNA analysis. In northern Europe, around 4000 BC, people started crossing pigs from the south with local wild boars. What were they thinking?
- Recent grassland losses are concentrated around U.S. ethanol refineries. The revenge of geography.
- Provitamin A biofortification of crop plants: a gold rush with many miners. “One crucial aspect that needs further experimentation is whether β-carotene-fortified crops can improve vitamin A status in the main targets of the biofortification efforts, that is, malnourished adults and children.” Just going to leave that out there.
- Genomic innovation for crop improvement. Longer reads needed. Is there no satisfying these gene-jockeys?
- Biodiversity redistribution under climate change: Impacts on ecosystems and human well-being. Species movements affect ecosystem functioning and service provision: “The indirect effects of climate change on food webs are also expected to compound the direct effects on crops.”
- Feeding the Household, Growing the Business, or Just Showing Off? Farmers’ Motivations for Crop Diversity Choices in Papua New Guinea. Some people grow lots of crops because it’s cool. But why wasn’t this done at the intraspecific level?
- To Specialize or Diversify: Agricultural Diversity and Poverty Dynamics in Ethiopia. Forget coolness, crop diversity makes you less poor.
- Biogeography of nodulated legumes and their nitrogen-fixing symbionts. Australia is weird.
- Plantations, outgrowers and commercial farming in Africa: agricultural commercialisation and implications for agrarian change. They all have their place.
- Genomic history of the origin and domestication of common bean unveils its closest sister species. Wild populations from northern Peru and Ecuador are not derived from wild Phaseolus vulgaris which migrated there from Mesoamerica but are actually a different species which predates the evolution of wild common bean.
- Genomic inferences of domestication events are corroborated by written records in Brassica rapa. Five genetic groups, with rapini at the base.
- Walking and talking the tree of life: Why and how to teach about biodiversity. Forget ranks, try clades.