- Nomadic ecology shaped the highland geography of Asia’s Silk Roads. Goat Roads doesn’t have the same ring to it.
- Agro-biodiversity has increased over a 95 year period at sub-regional and regional scales in southern Quebec, Canada. It’s all in the definition.
- Trees for life: The ecosystem service contribution of trees to food production and livelihoods in the tropics. Meta-analysis shows trees and forests are good for crop yields and livelihoods.
- Discovery and characterization of two new stem rust resistance genes in Aegilops sharonensis. Chipping away at Ug99.
- A study of allelic diversity underlying flowering-time adaptation in maize landraces. That’s a lot of genes.
- The challenges faced by living stock collections in the USA. Money, mainly.
- Low Genetic Differentiation and Evidence of Gene Flow among Barley Landrace Populations in Tunisia. One big happy family.
- Rethinking the approach to viability monitoring in seed genebanks. From germination tests to automated seed storage experiments.
- Evolution of Rosaceae Fruit Types Based on Nuclear Phylogeny in the Context of Geological Times and Genome Duplication. A story of whole genome duplications.
- Reconstructing the genome of the most recent common ancestor of flowering plants. The mother of all crop wild relatives, before all those duplications, has 23,000 genes and is 214 million years old.
- What Drives Deforestation and What Stops It? A Meta-Analysis. Money, and money, respectively.
DOI guidelines are open for comment
The Secretariat of the International Treaty is pleased to invite Contracting Parties and Stakeholders to provide comments for the update of the Guidelines for the optimal use of Digital Object Identifiers as permanent unique identifiers for germplasm samples – v.2 (herewith attached) elaborated within the Programme of Work on the Global Information System (GLIS) of Article 17.
Vegetable life on Mars
“Much to our surprise, despite the soil’s high salinity, two of the 75 potato breeds we had brought in were able to produce tubers in this soil. It was inspiring news to all of us,” Dr. Valdivia-Silva said.
That would be Martian soil. No word on whether the results will make their way into the relevant databases.
Agricultural death spiral
Based on our projections, the world will need only 25 percent to 70 percent more crop output in 2050 than was produced in 2014. This includes grain used to feed livestock and, to some extent, grain used for ethanol production.
I do like that “only.” In fact, and this is nothing new…
Food production will still need to keep growing to meet our updated goal of a 25 percent to 70 percent increase, but at an annual rate that is closer to the historical average.
Which will be increasingly difficult, what with climate change, decreased investment in public sector agricultural research in general and plant breeding in particular, and all. Not to mention the fact that changes in consumption patterns, ably summarized in The Economist this week, mean that for some crops the boosts in production will have to be unprecedented. Which will no doubt leave other crops behind, surrendering hostages to fortune, at least until the rich world develops a taste for them.
In the end, I suppose, if we survive that long, we’ll all be eating a couple of super-productive varieties of quinoa grown in urban vertical farms. Brave new world.
Brainfood: Hot pepper double, Tibetan chickens, Watermelon diversity, Sunflower accessions, CWR meh, E Africa early ag, Pristine myth, African deforestation
- Screening old peppers (Capsicum spp.) for disease resistance and pungency-related traits. Resistance does not correlate with geography within an Andean collection.
- Bioactive Compound Variability in a Brazilian Capsicum Pepper Collection. No accession is high in everything.
- Genetic evidence from mitochondrial DNA corroborates the origin of Tibetan chickens. That is, the surrounding regions.
- Morphological and genetic diversity analysis of Citrullus landraces from India and their genetic inter relationship with continental watermelons. Modern cultivars are homogeneous.
- Molecular diversity of sunflower populations maintained as genetic resources is affected by multiplication processes and breeding for major traits. Multiplication slightly reduces within-accession diversity. Well, in France anyway.
- Past and Future Use of Wild Relatives in Crop Breeding. Yada yada.
- Subsistence mosaics, forager-farmer interactions, and the transition to food production in eastern Africa. The transition to agriculture in E Africa was more than just the Bantu expansion.
- Persistent effects of pre-Columbian plant domestication on Amazonian forest composition. Domesticated species are more common around archaeological sites. Sounds like agriculture is not much more than the Arawakan and Tupí expansions.
- Human population growth offsets climate-driven increase in woody vegetation in sub-Saharan Africa. In some places climate change has positive effects, but these are swamped where there is high population growth.