- Small is beautiful. No, wait… And more from where that came, ahem, from.
- Evidence? We don’t need no stinking evidence.
- CIAT blogs about a workshop about a model about prioritization about populations about breeding about beans. While its peach palm thing gets picked up.
- Tibetan grasslands feel the heat. Not entirely certain why ICRAF should care, but it’s good to know.
- Peaches compatible with maize in Bolivian agrobiodiversity hotspot. Not nearly enough info in this release, will need to chase it up. And here it is.
- Rothamstead engineers lipids. But it’s for better nutrition, so that’s ok.
- Trad med in RSA.
- Fish as an ingredient of complementary foods. Nutritious, I’m sure, but I suspect Crocodile Dundee’s comment on the iguana applies.
- US wheat breeders worried about access. Maybe if the country ratified the ITPGRFA?
- Filipinos really like purple sweets, apparently. Here are some made of purple yam, ube, Dioscorea alata, call it what you will.
Nibbles: Drought, Forestry, Sustainable intensification, Horta, Tomatoes, Indian landraces, Seed Library, Wartime farming, EU legislation
- Is it too early to be talking about drought in the US?
- Or about collaborations between forestry and agriculture?
- How about the sustainable intensification of African agriculture?
- Enough of these rhetorical question, I hear you cry. Give us information! About wild greens on Crete.
- Or one person’s view of two remarkable tomatoes.
- Or how farmers in India seek – and find – seeds of older and traditional varieties.
- In Basalt, Colorado, you just pop into your local library. Rock on.
- In Toronto, Ontario, you watch TV to learn how your ex-overlords in Britain doubled food production in a few short growing seasons.
- And in Europe? You’re grateful to have received the same reply to your concerns about agricultural biodiversity as everyone else who shares those concerns.
Brainfood: Vitamin C, Nutrition and health, European protected areas, Coffea diversity, Climate change modelling, Soil microbes, Niche modelling, Conflict, Human modified landscapes, Horse diversity, Pigeon diversity
- The challenge of increasing vitamin C content in plant foods. Surely not just because it is challenging?
- Health economics and nutrition: a review of published evidence. “[A]pproaches and methodologies are sometimes ad hoc in nature and vary widely in quality.” Ain’t that always the way.
- European protected areas: Past, present and future. The future will need to be different from the past.
- Genetic structure and diversity of coffee (Coffea) across Africa and the Indian Ocean islands revealed using microsatellites. Good correspondence with morphological species. Madagascar a diversity hotspot.
- Special Issue of Agricultural and Forest Meteorology on Agricultural prediction using climate model ensembles. There’s more than one way to identify a potential adaptation hotspot. Well that’s reassuring. Not.
- Changes in soil microbial functional diversity under different vegetation restoration patterns for Hulunbeier Sandy Land. Restoring desertified grassland led to more soil microbial diversity. Which is good because…?
- A review of composition studies of Cameroon traditional dishes: Macronutrients and minerals. 117 of them. Good for Fe, Zn, Mg.
- Essential elements of discourse for advancing the modelling of species’ current and potential distributions. There’s lots of methods, all quite different, embrace the diversity.
- Understanding and managing conservation conflicts. Build up an evidence base, and employ some social scientists to explain it.
- On the hope for biodiversity-friendly tropical landscapes. In the end, it’s about the agriculture. In more ways than one.
- Genetic Diversity in the Modern Horse Illustrated from Genome-Wide SNP Data. High maternal, low paternal during domestication. Low diversity breeds the ones you’d expect. Similar breeds the ones you’d expect.
- Genomic Diversity and Evolution of the Head Crest in the Rock Pigeon. Middle Eastern origins, Darwin vindicated. Again.
Nibbles: Yarsagumba, Chocolate meet & dig, Beer dig, Mapping disease, Mapping language, Going digital, Urban ag meet, Weird citrus, CGIAR genebanks and more, Microbiome
- Off-colour jokes pumped out with abandon as Viagra fungus splashed all over headlines.
- Two of my favourite words in one conference: sustainable and chocolate. Can I get some archaeology with that? Yes, you can. Trifecta!
- Prefer beer to chocolate? We’ve got you covered.
- Sudden oak death mapping gets all interactive. Will nobody do something similar for agrobiodiversity?
- The geography of the onion. No, not The Onion. And not interactive.
- Go online, young scientist! Even if it involves giving banana research priority setting a Facebook page? Well, why not.
- Whoa, there’s an Urban Agriculture Summit?
- Citrus australasica? Seriously?
- CGIAR crown jewels safe at last. No off-colour headlines, please.
- Some genebanks doing ok, others not so much.
- Gut microbiome kinda sorta implicated in kwashiorkor. And more from NYT.
Nibbles: Cluster archive, Plant Press, Yet more quinoa, African viruses, African veggies, Slum livestock, Protected area monitor, Chinese rice variety, Talking shops, PGR course
- Another website archiving phylogenetic trees? What are the odds? Well, they are different animals.
- Did we ever link to The Plant Press? If not, we should have.
- The quinoa controversy rumbles on. We’ve got that covered too. And since you’re at it, why not help revise the descriptors?
- Bad news for Africa: plant viruses. Ah but there are varieties for that problem, no? No? Well, you can always highlight the little blighters as research priorities.
- Good news for Africa: local vegetables.
- Sort of good news for Africa, I guess: livestock in slums.
- New website keeps an eye on Protected Area Downgrading, Downsizing, and Degazettement. Interactively, natch. Well, actually, not so much. Can’t export, or import. Maybe the mash-up will fix that. Anyway, most protected areas are in the wrong place, aren’t they?
- Conserving Chinese rice, one variety at the time.
- Latest installment of The Economist’s Feeding the World thing is happening right now, and you can follow it on Twitter using #feedingtheworld. Or maybe you’d like to re-imagine agriculture with the CGIAR instead?
- Apply for the latest installment of Wageningen’s PGR course.