Mark Nesbitt of Kew manages a very useful resource on how to access botanical and ethnobotanical literature on the web. Compare and contrast with a recent similar effort aimed at the prospective germplasm collector. If you want a laugh, check out how we used to do things back before online was even a word. And if you want to look into the future, Roderic Page is a useful guide.
The cause of the problem …
… was a growing sensation that our RSS feed — served through Google’s Feedburner — could be a liability, as there are signs that Google is neglecting Feedburner. If you’re reading this in a Feed Reader, you might want to change the details to point to https://agro.biodiver.se/feed/ or just delete and subscribe again, which should pick up the feed automagically.
The bigger problem is the people who subscribe by email. We think we’ve sorted this out too, by adding all existing subscribers to a new list at MailChimp. If you are one of those, you should be seeing this message in an email. If you want to continue getting a daily update by email, there’s no need to do anything else. If you want to unsubscribe, there’s a link at the bottom of the email.
I hope that’s all …
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.
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…
All about baobab fruit powder, and then some
And you thought the world was safe from another baobab fact-sheet. Thanks, Ben Bennett.