- Geographic patterns in epigenomic variation. Yeah, but in Arabidopsis.
- A global strategy for conservation. Yeah, but for cacao.
- That “Diversifying Food and Diets — Using Agricultural Biodiversity to Improve Nutrition and Health” book? You’ll be able to get chapters and case studies from a dedicated website nine months after publication.
- Not to be outdone, the Ethiopian Institute of Agriculture Research lets you download “Defining Moments in the Ethiopian Seed System.”
- New Agriculturist fillets out some contributions to a recent Economist conference on malnutrition.
- The Brassica research community gets together in the UK. Not many people hurt.
Brainfood: Diverse grasslands, More diverse grasslands, Latitudinal meta-gradients, Acacia barcoding, Cryoconserving recalcitrant seeds, Tree tomato, Modeling parasites, Landscape complexity & services, Genomics & breeding
Transgressive overyielding of soil microbial biomass in a grassland plant diversity gradient. Dead link. More microbial biomass in mixtures of plants than in each of the monocultures. Which I guess is a good thing?- Ecosystem function enhanced by combining four functional types of plant species in intensively managed grassland mixtures: a 3-year continental-scale field experiment. That transgression goes for the yield of the plants too. The mixtures were also more resistant to weed invasion.
- Latitudinal gradients as natural laboratories to infer species’ responses to temperature. Meta-analysis shows that many life history traits vary with latitude, but not necessarily with temperature.
- DNA barcoding for conservation, seed banking and ecological restoration of Acacia in the Midwest of Western Australia. Not quite there yet, is it?
- Preservation of Recalcitrant Seeds. We have the technology. Recalcitrance is not an excuse. And may not be as common as advertised anyway.
- Genetic diversity and relationships in accessions from different cultivar groups and origins in the tree tomato (Solanum betaceum Cav.). It is variable. It originated in Ecuador. Even the press release struggles to say much more than that. They should have asked the mother-in-law.
- Metabolic approaches to understanding climate change impacts on seasonal host-macroparasite dynamics. Fortunately, and yet suspiciously, it is easy to estimate the model parameters even when you don’t have much data.
- Flow and stability of natural pest control services depend on complexity and crop rotation at the landscape scale. You need complexity in both space and time to get the most out of your landscapes.
- Improving fruit and wine: what does genomics have to offer? A lot. But you have to be ready for it.
Nibbles: Guatemala, Burundi, Bees, LANSA, Moringa, Sorghum domestication, Coffee rust, Zambian rhinos
- The USDA is plugging its Atlas of Crop Wild Relatives in Guatemala. So we’ll plug our post about it from November 2011. And ask again: where’s Paraguay?
- The Social Life of Beans in Burundi is a tour-de-force. I can never get enough of informal seed systems, especially from people who live in them.
- And a similar sort of thing on okra. What’s gumbo without it?
- Today’s scary bee decline story. With extra buzz.
- CGIAR comes in for some stick over the insidious view and cunning logic of “Leveraging Agriculture for Nutrition in South Asia (LANSA)”. I couldn’t possibly comment (and CG probably won’t).
- Oh boy! Global Moringa Get-togethers! In India!
- Sorghum domestication in Sudan: earlier, and less uncertain, than before.
- BBC piece on the new outbreak of coffee rust in Central America. Where are the resistant varieties?
- Head of Kew’s MSB tracks rhinos. Well, someone has to.
SimpleMappr taken through its paces
And speaking of maps, if you’re one of those botanists who has shouted “I just want a simple dot map!” in frustration, you will want to read the overview of SimpleMappr from Kew’s GIS Unit. And yes, you can share the maps.
Nibbles: UK horticulture funding, AVRDC, Biofortification, SRI debate, Stressed bees, Nutrient decline, Beneficial viruses, DNA for dummies, Chaffey, Cow genebank, Organic network
- For UK horticulturalists in need of cash. Wonder if that includes the rosemary collection.
- I’m pretty sure it doesn’t include AVRDC.
- Who would no doubt agree with Mark Lynas that “No-one disputes that a balanced and nutritionally-adequate diet is the best long-term solution to vitamin A deficiency and malnutrition in general.” And be as puzzled as the rest of us for the relative lack of funding for research on such a diet.
- A discussion of why mainstream agricultural science hasn’t got the message across about SRI, courtesy of Facebook. Yeah well, the whole concept of basing interventions on, you know, evidence, is not exactly mainstream. Just ask the balanced and nutritionally-adequate diet guys.
- Bees are stressed out, the poor things.
- Creative Commons graphs on changes in vegetable nutrient content.
- Not all plant viruses are bad.
- Pat Heslop-Harrison talks DNA, with his usual extraordinary fluency, from 11 mins in.
- Plant Cuttings! Everything from the botany of food to transcription factors for C4 photosynthesis.
- Cow genebank proposed.
- IFOAM gets a TIPI. Vandana Shiva no doubt ecstatic.