- 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.
Nibbles: Tree diversity, App diversity, Fish diversity, Botanist diversity, Conifer diversity, Genebank diversity, Cowpea diversity, Eurisco info diversity
- You saw it in Brainfood first, but now you can read a whole post about that paper linking tree species diversity with ecosystem services in ConservationBytes.
- Natural England launches an app competition. Me, I’d like to see this in an app (cf Australia). Mainly because I remember the days when we had to make such species distribution maps by hand.
- WCMC already has plenty of apps, it seems. As does CABI.
- Aquatic genetic resources getting catalogued, as a prelude to improved. Maybe they need apps?
- RBGE staff have more than an app for capturing data from herbarium sheets. They have a poster.
- Bet these Smithsonian guys had neither.
- Nor did they have Facebook pages, but the iCONic project does. And I’m sure it will help with protecting those iconic conifers. Geddit?
- CIMMYT replies to my query about where those Turkish landraces are going to be conserved. And ACIAR to my query about Timor Leste. What did we do before Twitter?
- We would never have got Ghana interested in improved cowpea varieties from Burkina Faso quite so fast before Twitter is my guess. And if the links to the tweets behind these three stories expire, you’ll be pleased to know I’ve storified them. And then had to unsatisfactorily export them to PDF when that website died.
- And Eurisco gets an RSS feed to go with that email newsletter!