Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

September 17, 2018

The need for seed

Next year’s ISTA Seed Symposium, on 26-28 June 2019, has a conservation-themed session that looks unmissable:

Session 2: Ensuring seed quality for future generations. Genetic resources, Habitat restoration, Post-harvest handling, Long-term storage, Moisture content and Equilibrium relative humidity, Desiccation tolerance and recalcitrance, Seed longevity, Maintaining the seed quality of non-crop species.

It’ll be in Hyderabad, and you can save a bit of money by booking early.

September 17, 2018

Brainfood: Social media, Wheat double, Apple diversity, Land use change theory, Land use change praxis, Intensification, Ag metrics

How Do Young Adults Engage With Science and Research on Social Media? Some Preliminary Findings and an Agenda for Future Research. Facebook, not Twitter. So I’m doing it all wrong? Any young adults reading this and want to tell me how I’m doing?
Genetic dissection of grain zinc concentration in spring wheat for mainstreaming biofortification in CIMMYT wheat breeding. Two interesting regions on different chromosomes.
Harnessing genetic potential of wheat germplasm banks through impact-oriented-prebreeding for future food and nutritional security. Not just Zn.
Genetic analysis of a major international collection of cultivated apple varieties reveals previously unknown historic heteroploid and inbred relationships. The deep history of the justly famous UK collection.
Middle-range theories of land system change. Towards a Grand Unified Theory. But do we need one?
Classifying drivers of global forest loss. Commodities, basically. But what’s the good of that without a theory?
The environmental costs and benefits of high-yield farming. Theory shtheory: measure externalities.
Beyond Calories: A Holistic Assessment of the Global Food System. Micronutrients get lost disproportionately badly along the supply chain. How’s that for a theory?

September 10, 2018September 11, 2018

Brainfood: Campesino maize, DELLA proteins, CC response, Nematodes, Collection duplication, Epidemics

Evolutionary and food supply implications of ongoing maize domestication by Mexican campesinos. Effective population of 500 million plants potentially feeds 50 million people.
Modulating plant growth–metabolism coordination for sustainable agriculture. Short AND sweet.
Cracking the Code of Biodiversity Responses to Past Climate Change. Quite a bit of adaptation, not just migration and extinction.
Plant-Parasitic Nematodes and Food Security in Sub-Saharan Africa. The greatest biotic threat to productivity on the continent, and probably going to get worse.
Efficient curation of genebanks using next-generation sequencing reveals substantial duplication of germplasm accessions. Out of 1143 accessions of a wild wheat in 3 collections, 564 are unique.
Emerging plant disease epidemics: Biological research is key but not enough. Not just about the money.

September 7, 2018September 7, 2018

Rescuing the ICARDA genebank

Another important CGIAR genebank with over 41,000 Triticeae accessions at the International Center for Agriculture Research in Dry Areas (ICARDA) housed in Aleppo, Syria has been lost from the turmoil in that region…

Err, no, of course not. I thought this story was better known than such a statement implies. Maybe this will help.

September 5, 2018September 4, 2018

We’ve mostly (though not entirely) steered clear of the Xylella crisis in Italy, because it all seems to futile. I was in Puglia earlier this summer and it was heartbreaking to see entire olive groves dead and dying, and for what? Because of fear and mistrust all around, and an absolute absence of any kind of societal solidarity. So the recent news that the infected zone continues to march steadily up Italy’s heel was in many respects inevitable.

The disease is now threatening plant nurseries, which may be even more important economically than those majestic old olive trees, because they supply huge amounts of grapevines for export. And what do the nurseries say? That “a lack of effective action on the part of regional authorities is responsible for the spread of Xylella, which is now unfairly forcing a crucial economic sector to shut down or move”. On the one hand, they’re absolutely right. On the other, they think that plant nurseries should be exempt from the controls because “no Xyella-infected plants have ever been identified in plant nurseries”.

To which, pessimist that I am, I would add only “Yet”.

Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

Posts

The need for seed

Brainfood: Social media, Wheat double, Apple diversity, Land use change theory, Land use change praxis, Intensification, Ag metrics

Brainfood: Campesino maize, DELLA proteins, CC response, Nematodes, Collection duplication, Epidemics

Rescuing the ICARDA genebank

Moving the goalposts