Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

October 31, 2018October 31, 2018

Counting your chickens

A new version is out of the FAO global livestock density datasets, which we have blogged about before. This is the third iteration (GLW3), and it has a reference year of 2010. There’s a paper to give you all the details. ¹

But there’s more to come:

Future versions of GLW will differentiate stocks according to production systems for ruminant (meat vs. dairy) and monogastric species (intensive vs. extensive, meat vs. egg production). Higher resolution models ² for individual countries where the census data can support such predictions will also be produced.

The datasets are also available for download from Harvard Dataverse.

October 30, 2018November 13, 2018

Diversity for Halloween

I’m not sure if I agree with the assertion, but this is a really nice poster.

October 29, 2018October 29, 2018

US strawberries set to invade UK

It looks like UC Davis is making a move after declaring victory in the Strawberry Wars.

The University of California has entered into a master agreement with Global Plant Genetics, Ltd., based in Norfolk, England, for the sublicensing of new strawberry varieties in selected countries within Europe, the Mediterranean and South America. The agreement governs the commercialization of new varieties from the UC Davis Public Strawberry Breeding Program located at the University of California, Davis.

I wonder how the other side is doing.

October 29, 2018October 29, 2018

Brainfood: Conserving rice, Cypriot olives, Bambara groundnut bioactives, Chinese spuds, Ancient pastoralism, Epigenetics, Diverse rice systems, Detecting evolution, CWR & pollution, VAM, Bacterial taxonomy

Securing Diversity for Food Security: The Case of Conservation and Use of Rice Genetic Resources. Great achievements, but “… 95% of the rice genepool remains untapped and unexploited in rice improvement.”
Characterization and Identification of Indigenous Olive Germplasm from Cyprus Using Morphological and Simple Sequence Repeat Markers. 125 trees, 32 accessions, 16 genotypes, 3 groups.
Quantification of Selected Anti-nutrients and Bioactive Compounds in African Bambara Groundnut (Vigna subterranea (L.) Verdc.). Nothing to worry about, but if you insist on worrying, try the cream-coloured ones.
DNA Fingerprinting and Genetic Diversity Analysis with Simple Sequence Repeat Markers of 217 Potato Cultivars (Solanum tuberosum L.) in China. Cultivars released since 1950 have a narrow genetic base.
Pastoralism may have delayed the end of the green Sahara. What have pastoralists ever done for us?
Epigenetic Diversity and Application to Breeding. Some epigenetic differences can be inherited independently of genetic differences. But how to use it?
Complex rice systems to improve rice yield and yield stability in the face of variable weather conditions. The more azolla, fish and ducks the better.
Can plants evolve to meet a changing climate? Yes, and we can detect it: the potential of field experimental evolution studies.
Wheat’s wild relatives vary in their response to nitrogen and ozone. In situ populations may be at risk.
Little evidence that farmers should consider abundance or diversity of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi when managing crops. One less thing to worry about? Ok, one fewer thing to worry about.
Exclusivity offers a sound yet practical species criterion for bacteria despite abundant gene flow. Taxa do exist if you take the whole genome into account.

October 25, 2018

Mapping crops, field by field

That’s what agriculture looks like around here, according to the Belarus-based ag-tech startup, OneSoil. According to the press release:

Today, OneSoil, a precision farming startup, announced the launch of a new map, the OneSoil Map, which it has developed to allow everyone in the agriculture industry to explore and compare fields and crops in Europe and the United States – 44 countries in total. The key feature of the map is that it allows users to see how these fields have changed over the past three years (2016 – 2018). To accomplish this, OneSoil combined public data from the European Copernicus Programme and Mapbox GL JS, the latter of which helped in visualizing large volumes of ag data. The metrics included on the map are hectarage, the crop, and country crop rating.

Still processing the enormity of it all.