Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog
Agrobiodiversity is crops, livestock, foodways, microbes, pollinators, wild relatives …
It was inevitable, I suppose. There’s now a whole blog dedicated to the “Diffusion of xylella in Italian olive trees.” The latest post comments on an article in Nature which seems to suggest things are beginning to move in normally sleepy Puglia, epicenter of the apocalypse. Here’s hoping. But I still think they should have …
That whole Xylella fastidiosa attacking olives in Puglia story? Shit just got real. The French are burning trees in Corsica. And the European Commission has come out with a factsheet. This explains that …there are four different subspecies of Xylella fastidiosa and that the strain identified in Apulia is a new genetic variant which has …
The NY Times is the latest media outlet to freak out about Italian olives. There’s quite a lot to freak out about. Xylella fastidiosa, the bacterium that is believed to have caused serious damage to perhaps a million trees in Puglia, Italy’s heel, can be spread widely by insects and attacks a wide range of …
Image-Based Goat Breed Identification and Localization Using Deep Learning. Fancy maths can identify goat breeds from photos. Ok, cool, now what? AI Naturalists Might Hold the Key to Unlocking Biodiversity Data in Social Media Imagery. Fancy math can often identify common flowers on Flickr. Ok, cool, now what? FoodMine: Exploring Food Contents in Scientific Literature. …
Lawrence Haddad on how to start transforming the food system. Here’s an idea: CIMMYT genebank recognized for restoring agricultural diversity in Guatemala. And another. Cash transfers are better than more conventional interventions for malnutrition, but they have to be real money. But, of course, they don’t always work. That’s one of many development myths listed …