- Impact of landscape alteration and invasions on pollinators: a meta-analysis. Habitat alteration and invasions equally bad on visitation rates, invasive animals more bad than invasive plants, and disturbance of the matrix more than fragment size. But there are some differences among vegetation types.
- The determinants of leaf turgor loss point and prediction of drought tolerance of species and biomes: a global meta-analysis. Osmotic potential at full turgor could be used to predict drought tolerance across species. Cut a long story short, that simplifies down to salty cell sap, give or take. Good for choosing crop wild relatives to use in breeding for drought tolerance?
- Market-based instruments for biodiversity and ecosystem services: A lexicon. If you want to tell your tradable permits from your reverse auctions. And really, who doesn’t?
- Phenotypic and molecular dissection of ICRISAT mini core collection of peanut (Arachis hypogaea L.) for high oleic acid. Much diversity in oleic acid (O) to low linoleic acid (L) ratio found. Breeders alerted.
- Phenotypic diversity and evolution of farmer varieties of bread wheat on organic farms in Europe. There wasn’t much of it, over 3 years.
- A Comparison of Dung Beetle (Coleoptera: Scarabaeidae) Attraction to Native and Exotic Mammal Dung. They really know their shit.
- Small-scale farming in semi-arid areas: Livelihood dynamics between 1997 and 2010 in Laikipia, Kenya. Life continues to be a bitch, there’s no other way to say it. But when will the people who measure livelihoods measure the diversity of people’s assets as well as their size?
- Climate-associated phenological advances in bee pollinators and bee-pollinated plants. About 10 days over the past 130 years, most of the change since 1970, and bee plants keeping pace with bees.
Nibbles: Genomic data, Seed porn, Ancient Amazonian ag, Genebanks Down Under, Climate data porn, Fiber in Maine, REDD+ at the CBD, Colony Collapse Disorder, Chili porn, Seed systems
- GBIF makes its move.
- Homaging the seed.
- Learning sustainability from old Amazonian farmers. Really old. Really, really old.
- Yet another Aussie genebank. Or maybe the same one, I’ve lost track. And interest.
- Where climate data comes from.
- Maine’s fiber community, what, exposed? Unveiled? Uncovered? And similar from Bolivia.
- REDD+ will save us all.
- Don’t crack open the mead to celebrate the solution to colony collapse disorder just yet.
- All things Capsicum on one handy website.
- Whole bunch of policy briefs on African seed systems. Don’t know if I’ll ever have the time to read through the lot, but cursory perusal suggests the following bottom line: the market can’t do it all by itself.
Brainfood: Medicinal plants, Einkorn diversity, Chestnut diversity, Leeks etc, Phylogenetic diversity
- The Use of Phylogeny to Interpret Cross-Cultural Patterns in Plant Use and Guide Medicinal Plant Discovery: An Example from Pterocarpus (Leguminosae. It’s kinda like parallel evolution.
- Genetic diversity in the Red wild einkorn: T. urartu Gandilyan (Poaceae: Triticeae). Northwest Syria and South Turkey contain the most genetic diversity, and genetic similarity is not a proxy for geographic closeness.
- Castanea spp. biodiversity conservation: collection and characterization of the genetic diversity of an endangered species. Overview of a 7-year project to conserve and study sweet chestnut diversity.
- Diversity in Allium ampeloprasum: from small and wild to large and cultivated. The continuing, complex saga of onion, leek and garlic evolution. It’s about heterozygosity, rathen than ploidy.
- Phylogenetic diversity promotes ecosystem stability. How crazy is that!
Brainfood: Dietary diversity, Diversity and diseases, Soil IK, Insect symbionts, Rhizobia, Wild lettuce, Tree genetic erosion, Pre-domestication barley, Strampelli
- Relating dietary diversity and food variety scores to vegetable production and socio-economic status of women in rural Tanzania. Dietary diversity was all too often alarmingly low, and when it was it was associated with seasonal fluctuations in the production and collecting of vegetables. But a more varied diet need not necessarily be healthier, so more procedural sophistication will be necessary in follow-up studies.
- A risk-minimizing argument for traditional crop varietal diversity use to reduce pest and disease damage in agricultural ecosystems of Uganda. For Musa and beans, more varietal diversity meant less damage and less variation in damage.
- Exploring farmers’ local knowledge and perceptions of soil fertility and management in the Ashanti Region of Ghana. Soils which farmers described as being more fertile were, ahem, more fertile.
- Population genetics of beneficial heritable symbionts. Of insects, that is. Important because they can confer protection from natural enemies, among other things. They behave a bit, but not entirely, like beneficial nuclear mutations.
- Widespread fitness alignment in the legume–rhizobium symbiosis. There are no cheaters.
- Genetic polymorphism in Lactuca aculeata populations and occurrence of natural putative hybrids between L. aculeata and L. serriola. Not much diversity in Israel, surprisingly. But isozymes?
- Meta-Analysis of Susceptibility of Woody Plants to Loss of Genetic Diversity through Habitat Fragmentation. The standard story — that trees suffer less genetic erosion because they are long-lived — is apparently wrong, even for wind pollinated trees.
- Large-scale cereal processing before domestication during the tenth millennium cal BC in northern Syria. “This was a community dedicated to the systematic production of food from wild cereals.”
- Nazareno Strampelli, the ‘Prophet’ of the green revolution. Before Norman, there was Nazareno.
- The memory remains: application of historical DNA for scaling biodiversity loss. Historical collections of salmon scales reveal many connections between modern evolutionary significant units (ESUs) in the Columbia River and old ones; but also, intriguingly, some differences.
Nibbles: Musa, Millennium Seed Bank, Cassava conference & blog
- The banana in the Pacific. Including those orange ones…
- Swapping seeds at Kew. A genebank reaches out.
- Gosh is that all today? Looks like it. You guys out there have anything?
- No, wait, here’s something else. Huge cassava conference coming up, with its biodiversity on the agenda. These guys will probably be there.