Wild relatives

August 12, 2024August 12, 2024

Funding opportunity for crop wild relatives

The Mohamed bin Zayed Species Conservation Fund has a small grants program and I hear they are looking for more applications targeting crop wild relatives.

The Mohamed bin Zayed Species Conservation Fund provides financial support in the form of small grants of less than $25,000 to conservation projects globally. These small grants are as much for the species as they are for the conservationists and organizations working so passionately to protect them.

August 8, 2024August 8, 2024

Nibbles: SeedLinked, Heritage Seed Library, HarvestPlus, Enset, EBI, Saharan/Sahelian flora, Pollen, Food & climate, Food prices, Moonraker, Svalbard eats, Devex does seeds, CGRFA ABS survey

SeedLinked: an app to source cool vegetable seeds. And more.
Want to become a variety champion for the Heritage Seed Library? Where’s the app though?
A compendium of evidence on the efficacy of biofortification from HarvestPlus. Jeremy surely available for comment?
Kew celebrates efficacy of enset conservation in Ethiopia.
Not sure if the Ethiopia Biodiversity Institute is in on that celebration.
Some of Ethiopia is Sahelian, no? Anyway, here’s a nice piece on the forgotten, but important plants from that neck of the woods.
We should all celebrate pollen banking much more.
Celebrity chef worried about the effect of climate change on food.
Including food prices. I dunno, maybe pollen banking will help.
Or maybe even a lunar repository.
Speaking of food prices, I bet this Svalbard restaurant is not cheap. Maybe there’s a nice view of the Seed Vault though. Who needs the moon?
The latest Devex newsletter has lots of stuff on food prices and prizes and (non-lunar) seed vaults.
Do you use any of the above for research and development? The FAO Commission on Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture would like to hear from you.

July 3, 2024

Nibbles: Forest seed collecting, Colombian maize, Türkiye & China genebanks, Community seedbank trifecta, Wheat breeding, Rice breeding, Bean INCREASE, WorldVeg regen, UK apples, Rangeland management

How to collect forestry seeds.
Whole bunch of new maize races collected in Colombia.
The Türkiye national genebank in the news. Lots of collecting there. Though maybe not as much as in this genebank in China.
But small communities need genebanks too. Here’s an example from Ghana. And another from India. And a final one from the Solomon Islands.
Need to use the stuff in genebanks though. Here’s how they do it in the UK. And in Bangladesh. And in Europe with the INCREASE project, which has just won a prize for citizen science. And in Taiwan. Sort of citizen science too.
Collecting apples in the UK. Funny, the canonical lost-British-apple story appears on the BBC in the autumn usually. Kinda citizen science.
Or we could do in situ conservation, as in this South African example… Just kidding, we all know it’s not either/or. Right? Probably a good idea to collect seeds is what I’m saying. Could even do it through citizen science.

June 18, 2024June 18, 2024

Brainfood: UK NUS, German labelling, Indian diversity, Ghana fonio, Kenya veggies, Rwanda biofortified beans, Cassava WTP, Urochloa resources, Perennial flax

Diversifying the UK Agrifood System: A Role for Neglected and Underutilised Crops. It’s really hard to pick potential NUS winners. So why even try? Support them all!
Can markets for nature conservation be successful? An integrated assessment of a product label for biodiversity practices in Germany. Labelling agricultural products can support biodiversity conservation, but probably not on its own. Can it support NUS, I wonder?
On-farm crop diversity, conservation, importance and value: a case study of landraces from Western Ghats of Karnataka, India. Plenty of diversity in these study sites, including of NUS, but ex situ conservation still needed.
Revealing Ghana’s unique fonio genetic diversity: leveraging farmers knowledge for sustainable conservation and breeding strategies. Supporting NUS is going to need the knowledge of farmers…
African indigenous vegetables, gender, and the political economy of commercialization in Kenya. …especially women farmers. Up to a point.
Cultivating prosperity in Rwanda: the impact of high-yield biofortified bean seeds on farmers’ yield and income. Ok, beans are not a NUS, but you get the point.
Increased farmer willingness to pay for quality cassava (Manihot esculenta Crantz) planting materials: evidence from experimental auctions in Cambodia and Lao PDR. NUS or not, clean planting materials and new varieties attract a price premium.
Brown-top millet: an overview of breeding, genetic, and genomic resources development for crop improvement. Urochloa ramosa is definitely a NUS. And labelling will probably not be enough.
Survival analysis of freezing stress in the North American native perennial flax, Linum lewisii. If you want to help your NUS, make it perennial?

June 3, 2024May 29, 2024

Brainfood: Biodiversity nexus, Nutrition interventions, European land suitability, Beyond yield, Cover crops, CWR breeding, Rice gaps, Banana info system

Understanding the role of biodiversity in the climate, food, water, energy, transport and health nexus in Europe. Meta-analysis shows that a lot of things people do affect biodiversity negatively, yet biodiversity affects most things people want to do positively.
Food Systems Interventions for Nutrition: Lessons from 6 Program Evaluations in Africa and South Asia. Have a strong theory of change, assess a range of outcomes, triangulate methods, including those from other fields, use adaptive and flexible evaluation designs, and document everything transparently. I wonder how many of these boxes the studied analysed above ticked.
Geospatial evaluation of the agricultural suitability and land use compatibility in Europe’s temperate continental climate region. Europe has run out of land usable for crops, but some currently used land is being used for the wrong crops.
Beyond yield and toward sustainability: Using applied ecology to support biodiversity conservation and food production. But does “suitability” mean “sustainability”? Probably not so much, but it should.
Global synthesis of cover crop impacts on main crop yield. Cover crops are good for yield. But didn’t we just say we should go beyond yield?
Editorial: Trends and perspectives for the use of crop wild relatives in crop breeding. Way beyond yield…
Global potential distributions and conservation status of rice wild relatives. Still a lot of work to do to save rice wild relatives so they can be used to, you know, move beyond yield.
Collecting and managing in situ banana genetic resources information (Musa spp.) using online resources and citizen science. Can probably say the same about banana wild relatives as was said above about rice, but I don’t see as much scope for citizen scientists getting into wild rice.