Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

January 28, 2014November 2, 2017

Infographic on crop production, by family no less

A tweet from Dan Chitwood of the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center really made my day today. He’s written a piece of code which shows production of different crops in 2011 (according to FAOStat) as a very cool infographic where the crops are differently sized circles arranged by botanical family. Here’s a screengrab, but go to the website, and click on a circle and see what happens. I so long to do this for genebank accession numbers…

January 27, 2014January 10, 2014

Brainfood: Domestication syndrome, Açaí cultivation, FIGS galore, Bean FIGS, Polish wheat, Rice groups, Chickpea QTLs, Cuban ag history, Agroforestry domestication, Conservation markets

Plant domestication versus crop evolution: a conceptual framework for cereals and grain legumes. Only traits showing clear dimorphism between wild and cultivated taxa are really part of Domestication Syndrome. If there’s a continuum, it happened afterwards.
Reconfiguring Agrobiodiversity in the Amazon Estuary: Market Integration, the Açaí Trade and Smallholders’ Management Practices in Amapá, Brazil. Açaí driving out other crops. Sometimes those underutilized crops should stay that way? Maybe not, as at the same time, homegardens are diversifying.
Mining germplasm banks for photosynthetic improvement — wheat, rice, potato, legumes and maize. You need maps.
Do faba bean (Vicia faba L.) accessions from environments with contrasting seasonal moisture availabilities differ in stomatal characteristics and related traits? Yes. Those maps again.
Can Polish wheat (Triticum polonicum L.) be an interesting gene source for breeding wheat cultivars with increased resistance to Fusarium head blight? What do you think?
Genetic diversity and classification of Oryza sativa with emphasis on Chinese rice germplasm. Six major groups, not five. We shall see.
Genetic dissection of drought tolerance in chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.). It could all (or mostly) be down to one genomic region.
Historical changes in the process of agricultural development in Cuba. I suppose one could say that, in a way, it’s back to the future.
Developing more productive African agroforestry systems and improving food and nutritional security through tree domestication. Participation, post-production, private-public partnership.
Market-based mechanisms for biodiversity conservation: a review of existing schemes and an outline for a global mechanism. Need to have a standard unit of measurement, and a mechanism for ensuring a long-term perspective. Can agricultural biodiversity learn from this?

January 24, 2014

Get cracking on another CWR abstract

Never rains but it pours. There’s another conference looking for abstracts: it’s the II International Symposium on Wild Relatives of Subtropical and Temperate Fruit and Nut Crops. It will be held April 7-12, 2014 in Baku, Azerbaijan in the conference hall of the Genetic Resources Institute of the National Academy of Sciences, in cooperation with the ISHS.

January 23, 2014January 23, 2014

Get a move on with those CWR abstracts!

The deadline for submission of abstracts for the international conference on “Enhanced Genepool Utilization — Capturing wild relative and landrace diversity for crop improvement”, to be held at NIAB Innovation Farm, Cambridge, United Kingdom from 16-20 June 2014, is closing on the 29 January.

So what are you waiting for?

January 21, 2014January 23, 2014

Joining up the dots

Four blog posts from the CGIAR today. Related, as you’ll see, but not connected. Leaving us to join up the dots. Because that’s what we do. You’re welcome, CGIAR.

From ICRAF, to kick things off, a piece summarizing the editorial accompanying the special edition of the journal Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability. The message is that the interaction between people and trees, in forests or agroforestry, is complicated and its study requires systemic approaches.
Funnily enough, over at CIFOR there’s an example of just such a study, looking at the relationship between forest cover and children’s nutrition. Which encountered just the sort of problem alluded to above: “We were unable to figure out from our data whether people living near forests are collecting more nutritious foods from the forest, if they are cultivating them on farms and in agro-forests, or a combination.” Awkward.
And so we come to the Landscapes for People, Food and Nature Initiative’s post on the use of mapping to look at ecosystem services. Including presumably the sort of ecosystem services the previous two pieces looked at.
Funny though how it doesn’t mention CIAT’s work on using GIS to look at the level of forest protection actually enjoyed by Colombian forests in that country’s protected are system.

LATER: Ok, ok, the third one is not really from the CGIAR. Read the comment for more.