Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Crops, livestock, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives, agroecosystems, foodways …
Remember that lupin coffee? Mike H provides an update. Complex and scary: Resources Research picks over the USDA’s supply and demand figures after the heat and drought. USD1 million for ICT in East Africa. Hope they’ll be visiting us. USDA finds ancient cacao variety at altitude in Peru; chocolatiers delighted. “We’ve got a gap between …
Continue reading “Nibbles: Coffee lupins, Supply and demand, ICT, Cacao, Malnutrition”
Scientists in the US and Israel have discovered a gene that can boost the protein, iron and zinc levels of modern wheats. It is present in wild emmer wheat (Triticum turgidum ssp. dicoccoides) but somewhere along the way to modern bread and pasta wheats became non-functional. Inserting the gene into modern wheat — by normal …
Two pieces of work on maize I recently came across are unconnected as to aim and place, but nevertheless make for an interesting combined story. One asks how far maize yield can actually be pushed by the environment; the other, how far we should define its success by yield anyway. The first study is a …
What Is Agrobiodiversity? Agrobiodiversity — short for agricultural biodiversity — is all the living things that people use directly or indirectly for food and agriculture. That means plants, animals and micro-organisms. It includes crop varieties and livestock breeds; and all the wild relatives of these domesticated species. It’s also the mycorrhizae, nitrogen-fixing symbionts and other …
Global wind patterns shape genetic differentiation, asymmetric gene flow, and genetic diversity in trees. The wind is blowing the answer, my friend. Social network analysis of the genealogy of strawberry: retracing the wild roots of heirloom and modern cultivars. Some 1500 contributors to the current, quite diverse cultivated genepool, from numerous species. Is Domestication Speciation? …