How to stay in touch

Attentive readers will have noticed that the little service we used to have here, whereby you’d get an email whenever there was a new post, is no longer available. Sorry about that. The reason is that it was too expensive. I do share new posts on my social media, but the best way to keep abreast of developments here remains our RSS feed. Nobody talks about RSS any more, but if you hate algorithms, it’s the way for you to follow the sites you want, the way you want. Just choose a feed reader and insert the link. It’s really easy, and liberating in a way. But if you don’t want to mess with a feed reader, and don’t mind an ad or two, you could try Blogtrottr. Just give it the RRS link and your email, choose “daily digest,” and sit back and wait for the email alerts to flood into your inbox. I’ve tried it and it’s ok.

Modified ecosystems and the conservation of crop diversity

A new global assessment of the state of terrestrial ecosystems has just been published, focusing on the extent of human modification due to “industrial pressures based on agriculture, forestry, transportation, mining, energy production, electrical infrastructure, dams, pollution and human accessibility.” 1

As is my wont, I tried to find a form of the data that I could shoehorn into Google Earth, but I failed. Fortunately GIS guru Kai Sonder of CIMMYT was able to snip out a kml file of overall human transformation as of 2020 covering Kenya — don’t ask me how. But thanks, Kai. I put on top of it genebank accessions from Kenya classified as wild or weedy in Genesys.

I don’t know quite what to make of this. The wild populations seem to have been mainly collected in areas that in 2020 were very highly affected by human activity. But is that good or bad?

It could be good — in a sense — if the high degree of human transformation means that the original populations are not there any more. 2 Phew, good thing they were collected! On the other hand, it could be bad if the concentration on easily accessible and modified areas means that the genetic diversity currently being conserved is not representative of what’s out there.

What do you think?

But of course what I really want is a version of this which focuses on agricultural areas and is updated in real time. Yes, a perennial favourite here: a real early warning system for erosion of crop diversity.

We knead oil

Jeremy’s latest newsletter has agrobiodiversity-adjacent snippets on the re-making of an ancient bread in Turkey and on the “oenification of olive oil.” Plus a thing on oysters which is maybe not so adjacent but is also fun and sports a title that is worth the price of admission on its own. Read it.

Brainfood: Balanced diets, Diverse diets, Diverse flavonoids, Micronutrients and GHGE, African traditional diets, Tef diversity, Intercropping, Sleeping crops, Cluster bean, Taste