Wild relatives

January 2, 2012January 2, 2012

Leftovers: Coconuts, Genebank, Vegetables, Famine, Danish, Bissap, Brazil nuts, Dates, Papas y mas, Fruit, Rice, Everything

We found these nibbles at the back of the fridge, and they’re not too mouldy, so lets fry them up before we get anything fresh.

Boss of India’s agricultural research exhorts international coconut genebank to do more and be heard.
And, first out of the gate for 2012, Nepal says it will create a new genebank for plants “on the verge of extinction”.
Immigrant urban agriculture — in Cleveland, Ohio.
Aid man Edward Carr interviewed: “drought does not equal famine”
Meetings on “biodiversity” in Europe, under the Danish presidency. Indigestible?
Hibiscus tea, what a tonic.
Resources Research goes crazed for book about brazil nuts, and other Amazonian agrobiodiversity.
A cure for Bayoud disease of dates? And it’s based on medicinal plants!
Pueblos andinos reciben ejemplares de tubérculos nativos. Otra vez?
Guerilla grafting? Now there’s an idea for “covert agriculture”. Wonder what the graftees think.
“The giant panda of the botanical world”? Blimey. A new reserve for real wild rice.
Huge Satoyama-style paper from Bioversity on THE USE OF AGROBIODIVERSITY BY INDIGENOUS AND TRADITIONAL AGRICULTURAL COMMUNITIES IN: ADAPTING TO CLIMATE CHANGE And they’re the ones doing the shouting.

December 15, 2011January 15, 2014

Nibbles: Law book, Sheep breeding, Pig breeding, Pink mushrooms, Coconut genome, Cassava genome, Apples in the Big Apple, Street food, Irish corner, Peach palm tissue culture, Seed saving, Kenyan farmers, First farmers, Tenure, Peppermint facts, Mountains, Taro network, Shea

Juliana Santilli guest-blogs on the book Agrobiodiversity and the Law over at Agrobiodiversity Grapevine.
ICARDA tells communities how to set up a sheep breeding programme.
While an Indian institute breeds pigs, with Canadian help.
Another Indian institute does the same for mushrooms, with no help.
And yet another sequences the coconut genome.
While BGI sequences a whole bunch of CIAT cassava stuff. Only yesterday they were doing rice. Yeah, but only 50, and you gotta keep those sequencers going, don’t you? Would be nice to know how much the CGIAR is paying BGI annually. Do they get frequent flyer miles? Have they negotiated a corporate rate?
A Kazakhstan apple tree grows on the East River. A forest, actually. If it had been in England, it might eventually feature here. Ok, ok, our quest for connections is occasionally overdone. Made you look, though.
Ah, kimchi! Ah, fish empanadas! So much interesting food, only one stomach lining…
Danny tells us about Ireland’s CWR database. In other news, Ireland has CWR. Oh, and then he goes crazy on the Biodiversity for Nutrition mailing list. Did he get his goat is what I want to know.
AoB on in vitro peach palms. Why read the paper, when AoB abstracts the abstract?
Bifurcated Carrots on seed saving in Canada. Video goodness galore.
And while we’re talking cinema, here’s news of a movie on a year in the life of four Kenyan farmers.
From Kenyan farmers to First Farmers. The Womb of Nations. I like that. And more. Agricultural hearths. I like that too.
Four days of discussion about land tenure. May not be enough, actually.
“…70 per cent of the peppermint sold in the US is descended from a mutant in a neutron-irradiated source.” Good to know.
I missed International Mountains Day. Again.
That EU-funded taro mega-project from a PNG perspective.
What I like about this Worldwatch series on neglected plants is that they’re not factsheets. Yet.

December 14, 2011December 14, 2011

Nibbles: Bees and climate change, Native American seeds and health, Sustainable harvesting and cultivation, Tree death, Grass and C, Vegetables, Fishmeal, Big Milk

Today: Connections Edition, in which we pick low-hanging fruit, think outside the box, and join up the dots.

The return of a US bumblebee. Is it due to climate change?
“These foods have meaning” for a Native American tribe (and for Africans for that matter). So will they be able to check out their seeds? And sequence the hell out of them, like rice?
If you want to harvest palm heart sustainably in the Colombian Andes, only take 10% of any population a year. Is cultivation an option?
Trees are dying in the Sahel. And yet boffins don’t know how to kill them. No word on what the grass is doing.
Vegetables and nutrition: the theory and the practice. Of course, a lot of them are grown in cities.
Why is so much fish made into fishmeal rather than eaten? Location, location, location. Of markets, that is. Kind of like for milk.

December 5, 2011December 5, 2011

Brainfood: Early farmers, Ecological restoration, IPRs, Soil bacterial diversity, Perenniality, Carrot diversity, Earthworm mapping

Ancient DNA from an Early Neolithic Iberian population supports a pioneer colonization by first farmers. People, not just crops, moved.
Genetic consequences of using seed mixtures in restoration: A case study of a wetland plant Lychnis flos-cuculi. After a few generations of use for seed production, it’s best to abandon ex situ stocks and go back to the wild populations.
Creative Commons licenses and the non-commercial condition: Implications for the re-use of biodiversity information. It’s complicated. I wonder if the multi-headed hounds who guard the gates to GBDBH are aware of this. Here’s a blog post.
Is diversification history of maize influencing selection of soil bacteria by roots? Kinda.
A horizon scan of global conservation issues for 2012. Perennial cereals make the cut.
How pristine are tropical forests? An ecological perspective on the pre-Columbian human footprint in Amazonia and implications for contemporary conservation. It doesn’t matter.
Genetic diversity of carrot (Daucus carota L.) cultivars revealed by analysis of SSR loci. Western and Asian groups, the latter more diverse, because of landraces. But 88 accessions does seem a bit few. And no wilds.
Mapping of earthworm distribution for the British Isles and Eire highlights the under-recording of an ecologically important group. 28 species! But many gaps. No diversity map. Will send them DIVA-GIS for Christmas.

December 2, 2011December 2, 2011

Nibbles: Plant conservation, AnGR training materials, ICTs in agriculture, CWR and GIS

Don’t understand the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation? Fear not, help is at hand.
Don’t understand livestock genetics? Fear not, help is at hand.
Don’t understand how ICTs could assist agricultural development? Fear not, help is at hand.
Don’t understand how climate change affects vegetable genetic resources. Fear not, do this postdoc at Wageningen and you will.