- Vegetables by Stealth: an exploratory study investigating the introduction of vegetables in the weaning period. Sneaking them into the diet is the most common strategy used by mothers to introduce their kids to vegetables. Reeeeeally?
- Assessment of Iranian chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) germplasms for drought tolerance. Four out of 150 local landraces showed promise. It really is a numbers game, isn’t it?
- In situ induction of chromosome doubling in vine cacti (Cactaceae). Potentially valuable autopolyploids were produced. Not that it was easy or anything.
- Who brought in the rabbits? Taphonomical analysis of Mousterian and Solutrean leporid accumulations from Gruta Do Caldeirão (Tomar, Portugal). People did, that’s who, but only during the later Upper Paleolithic. Before that it was mainly owls.
- Protected areas in climate space: What will the future bring? Nothing good. Both novel and disappearing climates are over-represented in current protected areas, at least in California.
- Progress in the utilization of Cajanus platycarpus (Benth.) Maesen in pigeonpea improvement. Baby steps.
- Classification of pecorino cheeses using electronic nose combined with artificial neural network and comparison with GC-MS analysis of volatile compounds. Wait, there are different kinds of pecorino?
- The need for country specific composition data on milk. Well, you’ve got me convinced.
- Rate-distortion tradeoff to optimize high-throughput phenotyping systems. Application to X-ray images of seeds. So, let me get this straight, basically, gauging the optimal trade-off between speed and accuracy in high-throughput phenotyping systems depends on what you’re measuring? Who writes these grant applications?
- Experimental growing of wild pea in Israel and its bearing on Near Eastern plant domestication. First pea growers were either very patient or very quick workers.
Nibbles: Tamil genebank, Econutrition, Sweet perception, Salmon, Texas culinary diversity, Amaranth, Nepal hermarium video, Restoration
- Provincial Indian university gets a genebank.
- Nutritionists go all ecological on us.
- But does that include taking into account human variation in taste perception? I’m betting no.
- The case against GM salmon.
- Going crazy in Austin’s market.
- Amaranth touted in Kenya. Sorghum and local millets unavailable for comment.
- Take a virtual trip around Nepal’s herbarium.
- Society for Ecological Restoration opens online Early Registration for the 4th World Conference on Ecological Restoration, to be held in August in Mérida, Mexico. You guys need a blogger?
Nibbles: Fashion, Climate change meeting, Yams in the Pacific, Poor excuse to quote Bob Dylan song, AnGR, Food in the Pacific, Cacao, Iraqi marshes
- Sustainable fashion, darling.
- “The world’s leading international researchers will review the history of climate change, appraise the current state of the science and identify adaptations for the future.” It says here.
- Fiji suddenly discovers yams.
- Genebank romance in Durango. Well, that felt good.
- Animal Genetic Resources vol 8 is out.
- Locavores go crazy on Guam.
- Cocoa origins celebrated. And why not?
- Seems like every few months there’s something else on how those southern Iraq marshes are being brought back to life. But what I really want to know, and nobody is saying, is if there are any crop wild relatives there.
Important Plant Areas documented
More than 200 areas across North Africa and the Middle East have been identified as wild plant hotspots, a report has revealed. The research lists 207 places which are internationally important for the plants they contain, including 33 in Syria, 20 in Lebanon, 20 in Egypt, 21 in Algeria, 13 in Tunisia and five in Libya.
The report in question is “Important Plant Areas of the south and east Mediterranean region,” ((Radford, E.A., Catullo, G. and Montmollin, B. de. (eds.) (2011). Important Plant Areas of the south and east Mediterranean region: priority sites for conservation. IUCN, Gland, Switzerland and Malaga, Spain. Gland, Switzerland and Malaga, Spain: IUCN. VIII + 108 pp.)) just out thanks to IUCN, Plantlife International and WWF, and downloadable for free. The maps are nice, of course, and I hope they’ll be available in digital form in due course, if they are not already. ((I’ll have a look around when I have a minute.)) And it is also great to see a list of species with restricted ranges; it includes quite a few crop wild relatives, in particular Allium and Vicia spp.
Brainfood: Cabbages, Crops in Darfur, Sowing dates, People and biodiversity, Honeybees, Rhizobium, Figs, Urban ag, Wild olives, Ancient textiles, Ducks, Wheat introgression, Food citizenship, Crop models, Trifolium, Variety choice
- Genetic diversity of Brassica oleracea var. capitata gene bank accessions assessed by AFLP. Czech genebank; subgroups reflected place of origin.
- Optimizing the cropping mix in North Darfur State, Sudan. A study of Umkdada district. “…the results of the model were different from the real practices of the farmers.” Oh dear. To improve the fit, schoolboys should work in the fields more. And crops should fetch more. The dismal science indeed.
- Climate-driven simulation of global crop sowing dates. Ok, this model works. You can predict sowing dates under rainfed conditions for various annual crops from climatic conditions. Not entirely sure why you would want to, though.
- Exploring some of the myths of land use change: Can rural to urban migration drive declines in biodiversity? Yes, counter-intuitively, at least in the forests of Mexico’s southwestern highlands. More from Conservation Magazine.
- Pollination services in the UK: How important are honeybees? Quite a bit, but maybe not as much as previously thought. It’s the wild bees, stupid!
- Genetic diversity and symbiotic effectiveness of rhizobia isolated from root nodules of Phaseolus vulgaris L. grown in soils of Iran. It is high, and it varies, respectively.
- Interspecific hybridization of fig (Ficus carica L.) and Ficus erecta Thunb., a source of Ceratocystis canker resistance. It’s a breakthrough!
- Exploring the diversity of urban and peri-urban agricultural systems in Sudano-Sahelian West Africa: An attempt towards a regional typology. There are 6 types. Not 5; not 7. On this one, the journey is more interesting than the destination.
- Variability of wild olives (Olea europaea subsp. europaea var. sylvestris) analyzed by agro-morphological traits and SSR markers. There’s a lot of variabzzzzzzzzzz…
- Hemp in ancient rope and fabric from the Christmas Cave in Israel: Talmudic background and DNA sequence identification. Mainly flax, but some hemp, from both Roman and Chalcolithic periods. But can you smoke it?
- Modelling the distribution of domestic ducks in Monsoon Asia. Low resolution data, plus fancy modelling, can be used to get pretty good high resolution predictions.
- Gene flow between wheat and wild relatives: empirical evidence from Aegilops geniculata, Ae. neglecta and Ae. triuncialis. It happens, a lot.
- Toward food system sustainability through school food system change: Think&EatGreen@School and the making of a community-university research alliance. Food citizenship?
- Simulation of winter wheat yield and its variability in different climates of Europe: A comparison of eight crop growth models. Big differences among models, so best thing to do is to use the mean of all of them.
- The potential of plant viruses to promote genotypic diversity via genotype × environment interactions. The negative effect of White Clover Mosaic Virus (WCMV) infection on performance differs from white clover genotype to genotypes, which means differential selection, which means negative frequency-dependent selection in host populations, which means diversity. Via.
- Amplifying the benefits of agroecology by using the right cultivars. Why should we summarize, when an author has already done so?