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.
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?
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.
Brainfood: Tanzanian maize, ITK, Genebank value, Congolese bananas, Amaranth domestication, Ethiopian coffees, Dacryodes diversity, Apple diversity, Breeding pulses, Commons, Beet genetic structure, Restoring landscapes, Indian agrobiodiversity
- Modern maize varieties going local in the semi-arid zone in Tanzania. OPVs from the 80s are creolizing still, and that’s a good thing.
- Traditional Knowledge Systems, International Law and National Challenges: Marginalization or Emancipation? Well, it looks like it’s the former, but should be the latter. ‘Twas ever thus.
- Valuing insurance services emerging from a gene bank: The case of the Greek Gene Bank. Benefits are greater than costs. Phew.
- Banana genotype composition along the Uganda-Democratic Republic of Congo border: a gene pool mix for plantain and highland bananas. You can still find new stuff. And get funding to look for it, clearly.
- Relationships between the Weedy Amaranthus hybridus (Amaranthaceae) and the Grain Amaranths. Multiple domestications? And why not.
- Genetic Diversity Analysis of Some Ethiopian Specialty Coffee (Coffea arabica L.) Germplasm Accessions Based on Morphological Traits. As ever, useful variation was found. We await its arrival in our morning cup.
- Genetic diversity of Dacryodes buettneri (Engl.) H.J. Lam (Burseraceae), a timber tree in Central Africa. There is some. It could be important, yada yada.
- Malus sieversii: A Diverse Central Asian Apple Species in the USDA-ARS National Plant Germplasm System. The infra-specific taxa may not hold up.
- Exploiting Genomic Resources for Efficient Conservation and Use of Chickpea, Groundnut, and Pigeonpea Collections for Crop Improvement. It’s so close, these guys can taste it. When will we?
- Is genetic information a commons? Maybe it should be.
- Genetic structure and gene flow in Beta vulgaris subspecies maritima along the Atlantic coast of France. The latitudinal cline that wasn’t.
- Restoration of degraded agricultural terraces: Rebuilding landscape structure and process. Restoration is not enough, you need continuous management thereafter. Probably applies to the agricultural biodiversity too, when you think about it.
- Agro-biodiversity in rice–wheat-based agroecosystems of eastern Uttar Pradesh, India: implications for conservation and sustainable management. Resource-poor farmers are better at agrobiodiversity conservation than rich ones. ‘Twas ever thus.
Demon pepper unmasked
“A friend” reached out to me with a strange request. “What could Tasmanian mezereon possibly be?” Seems he’d been served it at a fancy place in Germany.
The name tinkled a faint bell, which turned out on closer listening to be Daphne mezereum, a pretty shrub whose twigs are highly toxic, an extract being used to blister the skin (why? — wart removal?) and to treat arthritis (again, why?). That didn’t seem right, and anyway, the plant isn’t from Tasmania.
There have also been racehorses of that name, but when I offered that as a possibility, my friend said only “might have been, judging only by the taste”.
At this point I naturally had the bit between my teeth, so to speak, and set off in hot pursuit. Further searching revealed the item in question on the English language version of the fancy place’s website, to which I refuse to link as it assailed me with cheesy music. Looking at the website, though, all of the English seemed to be just a bit off. And the menu item in question:
Tenderlion [sic] of beef iced with hibiscus
Tasmanian mezereon au jus
A bunch of pumpkin, serrano-thai-asparagus
and risotto
As an aside, why bother even having an English language site if you can’t be arsed to pay for it. Anyway, off to the (presumably original) German version:
Rinderfilet mit Hibiskus glasiert
Tasmanische Bergpfefferjus
Kürbis, Thaispargel-Serrano-Bündchen
und Risotto
Now we’re getting somewhere. A quick search for Tasmanian mountain pepper, and Bingo!. Tasmannia lanceolata.
As my friend noted, “that is super interesting”.
I wonder what the Germans would have made of Cornish pepperleaf?