Wild relatives

July 24, 2011July 23, 2011

Photoguide to West African plants online

This interactive photographic guide ¹ shall help you to identify higher plants from West African ecosystems. It contains images of ferns and seed plants taken in the field. You can browse through a taxonomic hierarchy and/or search according to selected characters you observe on your plant.

Have we linked to this before? I seem to remember doing so, but can’t find the evidence. Anyway, it includes cultivated plants.

July 22, 2011July 22, 2011

Nibbles: AnGR, Fruit trees, IBC18, Tree pollination, Solomon Islands and climate change, Octopus diversity, Seed saving

Livestock diversity in the hands of FAO. No comment.
Let them eat fruit!
AoB breaks down International Botanical Congress 18 for us.
Species-poor tree plantations could be good for conservation of rare tree found in remnant forest patches in Chile because they encourage pollinators to move on. Agriculture, on other hand, is bad because it lures generalist pollinators into staying. Nature, don’t you just love it?
Climate-proofing the Solomon Islands to include “the isolation of crop species tolerant of high salinity, high rainfall, and drought.” Strewth.
Marine diversity. (Only kidding.)
Good advice on home seed saving from Suzanne Ashworth. She wrote the (a?) book.

July 20, 2011July 20, 2011

Nibbles: Gaur, AnGR, Wild Plants blog, Potato genebank, Research, Forests, Climate change

Cattle do the wild thing in Vietnam.
West African Ruminant Livestock: The Movie.
An interesting new botanical blog on me.
Who says working in a genebank is unrewarding? Technician is honoured with award, and that is not an oca she’s fondling?
Back40 dissects the trouble with agriculture; it isn’t dignified. Well, it is, but …
Forests are really, really good for economies.
Andy Jarvis pulls it all together: looking forward to a climatically less diverse world.

July 19, 2011July 19, 2011

Climate change in the dry areas

You may remember I blogged from a conference in Amman over a year ago. It was about how climate change would affect food security in the dry areas. Well, the conference proceedings has been out for a while, courtesy of ICARDA, but I only just found out about it. Lots of interesting stuff in there. Thanks, Colin.

July 18, 2011July 16, 2011

Brainfood: Pollinators, Cattle foraging, Sweet potato-pig system, Kava quality, Pastures, Pollen flow, Agrarian reform, Genotype diversity, Cacao cropping, Outcrossing

Contribution of pollinator-mediated crops to nutrients in the human food supply. 90% of Vitamin C for a start.
Foraging behavior of Alberes cattle in a Mediterranean forest ecosystem. It’s a semi-feral breed in NE Spain and its foraging behaviour may well decrease the risk of fires.
Assessing the impact of the SASA/CASREN technology interventions in the sweet potato-pig production systems in Zitong County (Sichuan, China). All well and good but in this day and age one would expect some exploration of the sustainability of the interventions.
Proposal for a Kava Quality Standardization Code. Very much needed because poor quality was probably responsible for examples of liver toxicity in the past. This is how to avoid that in the future.
Clipping stimulates productivity but not diversity in improved and semi-natural pastures in temperate Japan. Semi-natural pastures are more diverse than improved pastures, and can be reasonably productive. So there.
Pollen flows within and between rice and millet fields in relation to farmer variety development in The Gambia. Depends on breeding system. Likely higher within fields than between. Still no cure for cancer.
Land, landlords and sustainable livelihoods: The impact of agrarian reform on a coconut hacienda in the Philippines. It seems to be mainly in the mind.
Genetic divergence is not the same as phenotypic divergence. It isn’t? I’ll alert the media.
Scope economies and technical efficiency of cocoa agroforesty systems in Ghana. Multi-crop cocoa farms are better, in multiple ways.
Gene flow increases fitness at the warm edge of a species’ range. Outcrossing between edge populations better for living on the edge than outcrossing within edge populations, outcrossing with a center population or selfing. For a Californian annual anyway. Interesting consequences for in situ CWR conservation, in particular in context of re-introductions. Do we worry too much about “genetic pollution”?