Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

October 9, 2012October 10, 2012

Apologies for the downtime

I know just enough about web servers to be dangerous, as anyone who has tried to visit the site since last Saturday knows. For this, I am really sorry. I think most things are now back to normal, although there are clearly problems with the categories. ¹ And some things are just plain weird, still. These things take time. We’ll be thinking about the design; maybe going back to the old one, maybe trying something new. And we value your loyalty. So if there’s something not working, leave a comment here, or something.

The truly scary thing is the realisation that we are fast coming up on our 6th birthday. Perhaps everything will be working perfectly by then.

~~Here’s hoping.~~

Wow! I did it, and with a week to spare. Now just a couple of minor changes under the hood, as it were, and she’ll be good for another 5000 posts.

October 8, 2012October 18, 2012

Brainfood: Host-pathogen genomics, Maize-teosinte system, Organic Europe meta-analysis, Food perceptions, Guanaco, Earthworms, Pea & powdery mildew, Pea drought tolerance, Butternut regeneration, Wild tomato salt tolerance, Germination & climate change, Medieval melons, Barley domestication, Rice origin, Livestock & wildlife, Niche modelling, Insects

A Population Genomics Perspective on the Emergence and Adaptation of New Plant Pathogens in Agro-Ecosystems. Crop diversity affects fungal diversity as much as the other way around. Actually more so, as fungal genomes are incredibly plastic.
Teosinte as a model system for population and ecological genomics. Genetics of speciation, hybridization, various evolutionary questions: all can usefully be looked at in the maize-teosinte system with cheap next-generation sequencing. Oh, and that can help us with crop improvement.
Does organic farming reduce environmental impacts? –- A meta-analysis of European research. Per unit area, yes. Per unit product, not always. Need to mix and match. Good luck with that.
“Healthy,” “diet,” or “hedonic”. How nutrition claims affect food-related perceptions and intake? If you tell people something is healthier, they believe it is, in fact, well, healthier.
Guanaco management by pastoralists in the Southern Andes. They can coexist with cattle.
Earthworms promote the reduction of Fusarium biomass and deoxynivalenol content in wheat straw under field conditions. Earthworms protect crops from pathogens.
Screening of pea germplasm for resistance to powdery mildew. 14 accessions from 10 countries are promising. That’s out of 700. Hard row to hoe.
Sources of high tolerance to salinity in pea (Pisum sativum L.). Out of some 780 accessions, China seems to be a hotspot, but the most tolerant accession was from Greece. Any overlap with the previous results?
A rare case of natural regeneration in butternut, a threatened forest tree, is parent and space limited. In situ is not enough. Not if you don’t help it along, anyway.
Relationship between survival and yield related traits in Solanum pimpinellifolium under salt stress. 2 accessions among a subset of over 90 from over 300 in the AVRDC collection show high survival and yield under stress. Would be interesting to know if the 90 were indeed well-chosen in the first place.
Climate warming could shift the timing of seed germination in alpine plants. Spring emergence will shift to autumn, but the bad effect will be on the seedlings.
Medieval emergence of sweet melons, Cucumis melo (Cucurbitaceae). Lexicography suggests that there were sweet melons in Central Asia early on, but they didn’t get to Iberia until the late 11th Century, and to the rest of Europe until the 15th. Climate and the clash of civilizations to blame, as ever.
Tibet is one of the centers of domestication of cultivated barley. The other being the Fertile Crescent. Some Chinese hulless and six-rowed barleys in particular are similar to Tibetan wild material. But are the authors stretching the data?
A map of rice genome variation reveals the origin of cultivated rice. Or origins. Japonica first domesticated from O. rufipogon in the middle Pearl River in Southern China, and indica is a hybrid of the first cultivars with local wild rice in South East and South Asia. But have we not heard this before? Ah, but this paper has more, better markers, no doubt. Anyway, compare and contrast with maize and barley above.
Lessons on the relationship between livestock husbandry and biodiversity from the Kenya Long-term Exclosure Experiment (KLEE). Livestock and wildlife can coexist, but you have to work at it. Bit like the guanaco thing, then?
Modeling plant species distributions under future climates: how fine-scale do climate projections need to be? Doesn’t matter for total extent, but actual locations of stable climates vary with scale. On average, “270 m is fine enough,” but it really depends on the species. Probably safest answer is “as fine as possible.”
Fertilisers and insect herbivores: a meta-analysis. Fertilizers good for insect numbers. Which means bad for plants? But insect diversity? Wonder what they do to those earthworms and fungi above…

October 6, 2012October 6, 2012

All about baobab fruit powder, and then some

And you thought the world was safe from another baobab fact-sheet. Thanks, Ben Bennett.

October 5, 2012October 5, 2012

Analytical tools described

Recognising the need for a citable description of new methods and techniques in ecology and evolution, our Application papers describe new software, equipment, or other practical tools, with the intention of promoting and maximising the uptake of these new approaches.

So says Methods in Ecology and Evolution. And some of the methods and tools are going to be useful in the study of agricultural biodiversity too. Take, for example

Simapse — Simulation Maps for Ecological Niche Modelling, a free and opensource application written in Python and available to the most common platforms. It uses Artificial Neural Newtowrks (ANNs) with back-propagation to build spatially explicit distribution models from species data (presence ⁄ absence, presence-only and abundance).

See what I mean?

October 4, 2012

Free Borlaug book if you hurry

We have heard, almost too late but not quite, that

Noel Vietmeyer, author of ‘Our Daily Bread: The Essential Norman Borlaug’, is generously offering his book for free during this week through Amazon.com. The hardcover version costs $27, but through October 5 he is making the e-book version available for free.

Hurry, hurry.