Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

January 11, 2017

Wanna job? Seed Savers Exchange is hiring

One of the foremost public repositories of crop diversity is looking for a new Executive Director. What does the job entail?

The Executive Director is responsible for managing the Seed Savers Exchange’s day-to-day operations, staff, and all budget and fiscal matters. Additionally, the Executive Director will be expected to develop approaches to increase financial support through donations, grants, and membership, develop alliances with like-minded organizations, and increase overall visibility and support for the organization.

Of course you want more details, and we’ve got them, right here. But please, don’t ask us for any more information. We’re only doing this to help SEE find the best possible leader as it moves forward.

One thing I will say. Decorah, Iowa, is a rather nice small town.

January 10, 2017

Carolina African Runner everywhere

We’ve blogged about the Carolina African Runner peanut a number of times here, and it made NPR’s The Salt just after Christmas, but now it has received the podcast treatment too, thanks to Jeremy. It’s a great story, well told.

January 10, 2017

Agrobiodiversity Congress proceedings published

The Indian Journal of Plant Genetic Resources has published a special edition that includes the papers presented at the recent Agrobiodiversity Congress. Unfortunately, they are behind a paywall there, but you can download the whole thing from the Congress website, along with a bunch of other things.

January 10, 2017January 9, 2017

Brainfood: New communities, New journal, New sustainability indicators, New rice yields, New chickpeas, New tree map, Old barley, New wheat dataset, New oat “core”, New ABS guide, New threats

Mapping climatic mechanisms likely to favour the emergence of novel communities. New climate combinations are rare (3.4% of evaluated cells), but mean displacement moderately rapid (3.7 km per decade) and divergence high (>60° for 67% of cells). What will all this mean for CWR? As many are ruderals, maybe nothing?
Why biodiversity matters. Inaugural issue of Nature Ecology & Evolution. Not much on agricultural biodiversity, alas.
Bridging the practitioner-researcher divide: Indicators to track environmental, economic, and sociocultural sustainability of agricultural commodity production. Again, no surprise that biodiversity is hardly considered by either researchers or practitioners in monitoring sustainability, though that’s not the point of the paper.
Plausible rice yield losses under future climate warming. More even than IFPRI thought: −8.3 ± 1.4% per degree.
Recent breeding programs enhanced genetic diversity in both desi and kabuli varieties of chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.). But from a low baseline?
EU-Forest, a high-resolution tree occurrence dataset for Europe. Want European tree diversity, go to the Pyrenees.
Farmer fidelity in the Canary Islands revealed by ancient DNA from prehistoric seeds. New barley same as old barley.
Evaluation of 19,460 Wheat Accessions Conserved in the Indian National Genebank to Identify New Sources of Resistance to Rust and Spot Blotch Diseases. 45 accessions had known resistance genes against all three rusts as well as a QTL for spot blotch resistance.
Promoting the Use of Common Oat Genetic Resources through Diversity Analysis and Core Collection Construction. Interesting, but 21 out of 91 is hardly a core collection.
Utilization of genetic resources and associated traditional knowledge in academic research. A good practice guide for access and benefit-sharing. Well there’s no excuse now.
Identifying species threat hotspots from global supply chains. Global maps of which countries, and which commodities they consume, most endanger threatened species around the world.

January 9, 2017January 10, 2017

Happy New Year

Yes, we’re back from the holidays, fully energized ((Easy, tiger. Ed.)) and with a gargantuan helping of Nibbles to get your new year started the right way. There’s a Brainfood coming too, in the next day or two, before it goes back to its usual schedule of first thing Monday next week. Let us know if you came across anything during the past couple of weeks that we missed and you’d like to share with others interested in all thing agrobiodiverse. And don’t forget we tweet this sort of stuff all the time, even from the beach.

Unripe #kenya #beach #pandanus

A photo posted by Luigi Guarino (@ggguarino) on Jan 1, 2017 at 1:58am PST