Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

January 18, 2013

For people who can’t read many different words

‘BIODIVERSITY’

We love animals and green things and we need them for food, houses, to make sick people better, to clean the air and water, to hold down the ground, to know things and to be happy outside. For all of these things, lots of different kinds of animals and green things are better than only a few kinds. So we’re scared because the animals and green things are not safe from some of the things we do, like when we cut trees down, put bad smells in the air, take good things out of the big water and put bad things in and make the air around our rock in space get hot too fast.

Karen James wrote this, using only the thousand most common words.

Can you do better?

p.s. There’s a Tumblr for that.

January 18, 2013

Is a new Cornucopia in the works?

Stephen Facciola’s Cornucopia is the bible of everyone interested in the oddities of the edible landscape. With it’s densely packed pages, numerous lists, and astonishing detail, it is everything you need wrapped in soft covers. It is also quite old. Now Facciola has posted an advert for a “Photographer, ethnobotanist, foodie”

Applicant will be photographing plants, plant parts, food products, food ingredients, etc., at ethnic and gourmetfood markets, farmers’ markets, germplasm repositories, market gardens, orchards, farms, botanical gardens, and seed banks in the U.S. and overseas. Must be willing to make long term commitment.

I can’t wait to see the results.

January 17, 2013

Fellowship available on Agrobiodiversity and Climate Change

The Basque Centre for Climate Change (BC3), offers a one year full time research fellowship (with the possibility of extension) with the level of financial support according to the academic and professional profile of the applicant.

There is a need to understand what policies can efficiently and equitably enhance farmers’ livelihoods by increasing their capacity to adapt to climate change. Climate change is expected to increasingly threaten the conservation of wild and domesticated biodiversity, including, agrobiodiversity, as changing local climates place habitats and species at increasing risk of extinction. Agrobiodiversity and associated ecosystem services are key factors that affect the resilience of agroecosystems and food security. However, the largest investments in food production continue to be associated with agricultural innovations to increase the productivity of some major crops and livestock, which are often advocated as crucial for agricultural climate change adaptation. Much less emphasis is being put on local systems that rely on existing natural, human and social capital assets such as agrobiodiversity, traditional knowledge and collective action institutions, such as seed systems, to reduce vulnerability and ensure food security.

Full details if you scroll down on the BC3 website.

January 15, 2013

Horticulture CRSP response on drying beads

Kent J. Bradford, Peetambar Dahal and Brenda Dawson of Horticulture CRSP have responded at length to the comments made by Robin Probert and Fiona Hay on their factsheet promoting the use of Zeolite as a possible alternative to silica gel to dry seeds. Many thanks to them all for taking the time to engage in this debate. Please read the rebuttal in full, it’s very detailed and will be of great interest to anyone who keeps seed healthy for a living. However, if I were to be forced to pick a couple of quotes as take-home messages, they would be these:

At present, drying beads are probably economical only for high-value vegetable seeds or germplasm repositories, but there are simple ways to utilize drying beads in forced-air drying systems that could be adaptable to larger seed or commodity volumes, such as in combination with large plastic grain bags that are coming into use.
…
We believe that drying beads should be of particular interest for seed banks in developing countries where power outages make continuous operation of refrigeration and dehumidification equipment problematic. We expect that drying beads combined with hermetic containers could largely replace dehumidification of large storage rooms in seed banks. Enclosing a small quantity of beads in foil packet or glass jar with a seed sample would be a great solution for local seed banks that may not have the drying equipment that Robin mentioned.

Which are not altogether dissimilar conclusions to the ones we originally came to, but as I say, read the whole thing and make up your own mind. It would be great to hear from anyone out there that has experience of using these drying beads, whether in a genebank or other context. If you do, or know anyone who does, leave a comment below.

January 14, 2013January 29, 2013

Brainfood: Barley phylogeny, Strawberry smell, C4, European tree sap, Conservation anthropology, Seed systems, Profitability of diversity, Wheat breeding, Rice breeding, Forest conservation, Neolithic transition, Forest ecosystem services, Diversity and area

Phylogenetic analysis in some Hordeum species (Triticeae; Poaceae) based on two single-copy nuclear genes encoding acetyl-CoA carboxylase. Divides up the Africa/Asia and American clades, but not perfectly.
Journeys through aroma space: a novel approach towards the selection of aroma-enriched strawberry cultivars in breeding programmes. Breed a better smelling strawberry in this way, and the world will beat a path to your door.
Strategies for engineering C4 photosynthesis. More than one way to skin a cat. But is it worth doing if you don’t eat cats?
Uses of tree saps in northern and eastern parts of Europe. Not what it used to be.
Resequencing rice genomes: an emerging new era of rice genomics. Maybe. But it would have been better if they had sequenced something other than Nipponbare originally.
Toward conservational anthropology: addressing anthropocentric bias in anthropology. “Traditional practices” not always all that great.
Seed exchange networks for agrobiodiversity conservation. A review. Farmers have to be “well connected” for conservation to work. But nobody really knows what that means.
Landscape diversity and the resilience of agricultural returns: a portfolio analysis of land-use patterns and economic returns from lowland agriculture. Higher gross margin related positively to greater variance, negatively to diversity, in lowland UK, up to 12000 ha.
Marker-assisted development and characterization of a set of Triticum aestivum lines carrying different introgressions from the T. timopheevii genome. Getting resistance out of wild relatives and into crops.
Physical localization of a novel blue-grained gene derived from Thinopyrum bessarabicum. Getting blue pigments out of a wild relative and into wheat.
Improvement of two traditional Basmati rice varieties for bacterial blight resistance and plant stature through morphological and marker-assisted selection. Getting blight resistance out of an improved variety to improve traditional ones.
Maintaining or Abandoning African Rice: Lessons for Understanding Processes of Seed Innovation. Farmers play an important role in adopting and developing new varieties shock.
Dynamic Conservation of Forest Genetic Resources in 33 European Countries. It happens.
The impact of the Neolithic agricultural transition in Britain: a comparison of pollen-based land-cover and archaeological 14C date-inferred population change. Pollen and archaeology agree on dates, the rest is history.
Higher levels of multiple ecosystem services are found in forests with more tree species. Swedish production forests, anyway. And more. And more.