- Impact investing in biodiversity conservation with bonds: An analysis of financial and environmental risk. Need to show ’em the money, and that ain’t easy.
- The benefits and trade-offs of agricultural diversity for food security in low- and middle-income countries: A review of existing knowledge and evidence. Agrobiodiversity is positively connected with food security in two thirds of cases. Here comes the money…
- Repurposing agricultural support: Creating food systems incentives to address climate change. Less money for subsidies and trade barriers, more money for R&D.
- Orphan Crops: A Best Fit for Dietary Enrichment and Diversification in Highly Deteriorated Marginal Environments. More money for R&D you say? Document the evidence that orphan crops are good for you, link it to policy and communicate it to consumers.
- Extension services can promote pasture restoration: Evidence from Brazil’s low carbon agriculture plan. If only there were more money for extension too, eh?
- Linking livelihood and biodiversity conservation in protected areas: Community based tourism development perspective from developing country. People around protected areas don’t see much money from tourists, but that’s better than nothing.
- From boutique to mainstream: Upscaling wildlife-friendly farming through consumer premiums. Consumers are willing to fork over extra money for greener food.
New crop of crop maps crops up
Data viz wiz Erin has a bunch of excellent new maps of crop distributions in the USA over on her website. The data come from USDA Quick Stats, but her maps are way cooler. This, for examples, shows very strikingly what a powerhouse of agricultural biodiversity California is. Though I guess southern Texas comes close.
Damn what a beautiful ram
Brainfood: First farmers, First dogs, First olives, Food sharing, Seed longevity, Seed germination, Conservation & climate change, Urban gardens, Seed movement, Machine learning, Web crawling, Imaging spectroscopy
- Ancient DNA maps ‘dawn of farming’. Hunter-gatherers from Europe and the Middle East mixed and settled down as farmers in Anatolia, then spread to Europe.
- The Australian dingo is an early offshoot of modern breed dogs. The dingo originated from grey wolves, and found itself isolated, much earlier than all other dog breeds.
- The first use of olives in Africa around 100,000 years ago. Hunter-gatherers used the wild olive long before they domesticated either it or the dog.
- Intestinal parasites in the Neolithic population who built Stonehenge (Durrington Walls, 2500 BCE). Neolithic people and their dogs ate the same things.
- Comparative seed longevity under genebank storage and artificial ageing: a case study in heteromorphic wheat wild relatives. Seeds of the same crop wild relatives species but with different shapes have different seed longevities.
- Stepping up to the thermogradient plate: a data framework for predicting seed germination under climate change. But do heteromorphic seeds have different germination requirements too? Here’s how to find out.
- Conservation interventions can benefit species impacted by climate change. Biodiversity was helped with the effects of climate change in 30% of cases, especially if interventions were targeted on specific species. Genebanks available for comment.
- Urban conservation gardening in the decade of restoration. Speaking of interventions…
- South and/or north: an indigenous seed movement in South Korea and the multiple bases of food sovereignty. Wait, what about the genebank though?
- Perspectives in machine learning for wildlife conservation. Surely if you can use fancy tech and maths to monitor cheetahs, monitoring crop wild relative populations and landraces should be a doddle.
- Quantifying an online wildlife trade using a web crawler. Surely if you can crawl the web for evidence of illicit wildlife trade, crawling it to evidence of genetic erosion of crop diversity should be a doddle.
- Plant beta-diversity across biomes captured by imaging spectroscopy. How about capturing beta-diversity within crop fields, though? A doddle, no? We’ve come a long way since those first Anatolian farmers and their dingoes.
Trade and germplasm
Want to know why New Zealand has a huge collection of temperate forage diversity in its Margot Forde Forage Germplasm Centre, part of AgResearch Ltd? Just check out its exports on the OEC website.
I learned about the OEC’s snazzy visualisations of economic data via their addictive daily game Tradle, which invites you to guess the country based on its exports.
I think we should do a version where you guess the country based on its genebank holdings, but that’s another story.