- Seed security response during COVID-19: building on evidence and orienting to the future. First and foremost, support farmers save their seeds.
- Blended finance for agriculture: exploring the constraints and possibilities of combining financial instruments for sustainable transitions. How about supporting farmers save their seeds?
- Dynamic conservation of genetic resources: Rematriation of the maize landrace Jala. Genebanks helping farmers save their seeds.
- Molecular Parallelism Underlies Convergent Highland Adaptation of Maize Landraces. Early farmers saving their maize seeds in the Mexican highlands eventually helped out farmers in the Andean highlands. With GIF goodness.
- Open access to genetic sequence data maximizes value to scientists, farmers, and society. How will it help farmers save their seeds?
- Applying Knowledge of Southern Seed Savers to Community-Based Agricultural Biodiversity Conservation Practice. The people saving and swapping seeds in the Ozarks respond to films, need how-to manuals, and could be a tad more diverse. I suspect this is not just true in Arkansas.
- Characterization of wheat germplasm conserved in the Indian National Genebank and establishment of a composite core collection. Farmers trying to save their seeds rejoice.
- Heritable epigenetic diversity for conservation and utilization of epigenetic germplasm resources of clonal East African Highland banana (EAHB) accessions. Hey, it’s not just seeds. Methylation patterns follow geography but not morphology in a genetically uniform group of vegetatively propagated cultivars.
- Blind spots in global soil biodiversity and ecosystem function research. Not now, soil biodiversity, I’m too busy dealing with seeds.
- Narrow genetic base shapes population structure and linkage disequilibrium in an industrial oilseed crop, Brassica carinata A. Braun. Landraces of Ethiopian mustard and improved lines cluster in separate groups, but overall diversity is low. Not enough seeds saved, perhaps?
- High-Throughput Genome-Wide Genotyping To Optimize the Use of Natural Genetic Resources in the Grassland Species Perennial Ryegrass (Lolium perenne L.). Only possible because of saved seeds.
- Presence of resveratrol in wild Arachis species adds new value to this overlooked genetic resource. I hope we’ve saved enough seeds.
- Main Challenges and Actions Needed to Improve Conservation and Sustainable Use of Our Crop Wild Relatives. It’s quite difficult — and insufficient — to save the seeds of wild species, but we should do it nevertheless.
- Influence of diversity and intensification level on vulnerability, resilience and robustness of agricultural systems. Why we should all save seeds.
Nibbles: Gumbo ingredients, Seed library, Pomology award, Breeding presentation, Seed storage
- Not-so-suffering sassafrass.
- Another seed library, this one in Canada.
- Fruit breeder Dr David Cain gets 2020 Wilder Medal from American Pomological Society.
- PowerPoint on plant breeding. Dr Cain unavailable for comment.
- Which species can you bank anyway? With video goodness. Which I agree is not all that unusual these days, but still.
Brainfood: Niche modelling, Post-2020 double, CC & productivity, Wild cacao, Popcorn data, Regulations, Duplicates, Oz ag, Kenya diversity, Stressed wheat, DUS, Connectivity, Population differentiation
- ntbox: an R package with graphical user interface for modeling and evaluating multidimensional ecological niches. Yes, another one, deal with it.
- Global targets that reveal the social–ecological interdependencies of sustainable development. The post-2020 framework should not have separate targets for social and ecological outcomes.
- Integrating agroecological production in a robust post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework. Case in point?
- The Historical Impact of Anthropogenic Climate Change on Global Agricultural Productivity. We’ve lost a decade of productivity growth since 1961.
- Exploring the diversity and distribution of crop wild relatives of cacao (Theobroma cacao L.) in Colombia. Habitat protection needed.
- The Global Popcorn Project. Here comes the data! And more.
- Editorial: Leeway to Operate With Plant Genetic Resources. Research Topic on ABS, biosafety and IPR regulations and how they affect use of PGR.
- SNP Markers and Evaluation of Duplicate Holdings of Brassica oleracea in Two European Genebanks. Out of 10 pairs of accessions with similar names in the Russian and Nordic genebanks, 5 showed genetic differences, and 3 of these also morphological differences.
- History of crop introductions, breeding and selection in Australia: The 140 years from 1788. But at what cost?
- The welfare effects of crop biodiversity as an adaptation to climate shocks in Kenya. Crop diversity mitigates income variability risk caused by climate.
- Genetics of yield, abiotic stress tolerance and biofortification in wheat (Triticum aestivum L.). Well that seems sorted then.
- Is plant variety registration keeping pace with speed breeding techniques? No?
- Global Cropland Connectivity: A Risk Factor for Invasion and Saturation by Emerging Pathogens and Pests. Nice maps of ease of movement among different cultivation areas of vegetatively propagated crops. Could be used to model movement of genetic resources as well as of pests/diseases?
- Global patterns of population genetic differentiation in seed plants. More population differentiation for tropical, mixed‐mating, non‐woody species pollinated by small insects, and lower for temperate, outcrossing trees pollinated by wind. Could perhaps be mashed up with this fragmentation database.
Brainfood: Global Food Security, Neutral diversity, Bottlenecks, Slovenian lettuce, Swedish apples, Mungbean diversity, Crop suitability, Breeding graph, Herding diet, Cool shit, Seed storage double, Wild quinoa, Mighty wind
- A research vision for food systems in the 2020s: Defying the status quo. Research is necessary but not sufficient.
- Dismantling a dogma: the inflated significance of neutral genetic diversity in conservation genetics. Not all genetic diversity is created equal.
- A re‐evaluation of the domestication bottleneck from archaeogenomic evidence. Not so much a single bottleneck “event” on domestication, as serial bottlenecks post-domestication. Another dogma dismantled?
- Morphological and genetic diversity of Slovene lettuce landrace ‘Ljubljanska ledenka’ (Lactuca sativa L.). Not all iceberg is created equal.
- Genetic Status of the Swedish Central collection of heirloom apple cultivars. Neutral diversity is not completely useless, though?
- Understanding genetic variability in the mungbean (Vigna radiata L.) genepool. It may not be neutral variation, but it’s not associated with geography. If you see what I mean.
- A Land Evaluation Framework for Agricultural Diversification. Soil and climate data –> fancy maths –> pretty good prediction of where you find a crop.
- A unifying concept of animal breeding programs. You can describe any breeding programme by using graph theory. But would it help?
- Molecular and isotopic evidence for milk, meat, and plants in prehistoric eastern African herder food systems. Chemical and isotope analysis of lipids on ceramic shards shows early herding societies had a pretty diverse diet.
- Pre-Clovis occupation of the Americas identified by human fecal biomarkers in coprolites from Paisley Caves, Oregon. Lipids again, this time at the other end of the process, and of the world.
- Identification of novel seed longevity genes related to oxidative stress and seed coat by genome‐wide association studies and reverse genetics. Seeds need to take their antioxidants.
- Evaluation of genetic integrity of pearl millet seeds during aging by genomic-SSR markers. Loss of viability leads to loss of diversity.
- Geographical distribution of quinoa crop wild relatives in the Peruvian Andes: a participatory mapping initiative. Cultivated land is as important as more “natural” ecosystems for quinoa wild relatives.
- Global wind patterns and the vulnerability of wind-dispersed species to climate change. In the tropics, and in the lee of mountains, wind-dispersed species will find it more difficult to reach places with suitable future climates.
Meta-Brainfood for the weekend
Time to clean up a few things, I think. For a while now, I’ve been hoarding links to edited volumes. My idea was to do a special dedicated Brainfood on each one, but I now fear that just ain’t gonna happen. Too much other stuff on. So here they are. Maybe one of you will help me out? You know what to do. A pithy one or two sentences summarizing each paper, based on the abstract only if you’re into the whole brevity thing. Interested? Let me know in the comments below, and we’ll set something up. Our first guest-curated Brainfood…
Here they are:
- Do you remember the 2017 book Against The Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States by James C. Scott? I think we may have blogged about it. Anyway, it suggested that it was grain (as opposed to tuber) cultivation that led to the development of hierarchical states. Grain is visible and portable, and so easy to tax, you see. There are interviews with the author galore if you like podcasts. Ok, well, the Cambridge Archaeological Journal had a whole Review Symposium deconstructing that particular revisionist narrative.
- In 2018, something called the 1st International Conference on Genetic Resources and Biotechnology was held in Bogor, Indonesia. A bit of a misnomer, it was really mainly about “[i]nformation system and exchanges of genetic resources for effective crop improvement.” These are the proceedings, and all of the dozens of papers are open access. Maybe someone out there could do their Top 10.
- This one is not as relevant as the others, but it’s interesting nonetheless: Remote Sensing of Plant Biodiversity. Surely some of the 20 contributions have something to say about agricultural biodiversity? Who’s willing to have a look?
- Then there’s the Special Issue of Application in Plant Sciences on Machine Learning in Plant Biology: Advances Using Herbarium Specimen Images. Yummy. Automated identification of CWR specimens, anyone?
- And finally, just out, a Topical Collection in Agriculture and Human Values on Agriculture, Food & Covid-19. Come on, who can resist a hot-take (well, a Rapid Response Opinion) entitled Maybe there is an alternative after all?
Looking forward to hearing from you.
And don’t worry, there’ll be a normal Brainfood on Monday as usual.