Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

June 8, 2022June 8, 2022

New crop of crop maps crops up

Data viz wiz Erin has a bunch of excellent new maps of crop distributions in the USA over on her website. The data come from USDA Quick Stats, but her maps are way cooler. This, for examples, shows very strikingly what a powerhouse of agricultural biodiversity California is. Though I guess southern Texas comes close.

June 7, 2022

Damn what a beautiful ram

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May 30, 2022May 30, 2022

Brainfood: First farmers, First dogs, First olives, Food sharing, Seed longevity, Seed germination, Conservation & climate change, Urban gardens, Seed movement, Machine learning, Web crawling, Imaging spectroscopy

Ancient DNA maps ‘dawn of farming’. Hunter-gatherers from Europe and the Middle East mixed and settled down as farmers in Anatolia, then spread to Europe.
The Australian dingo is an early offshoot of modern breed dogs. The dingo originated from grey wolves, and found itself isolated, much earlier than all other dog breeds.
The first use of olives in Africa around 100,000 years ago. Hunter-gatherers used the wild olive long before they domesticated either it or the dog.
Intestinal parasites in the Neolithic population who built Stonehenge (Durrington Walls, 2500 BCE). Neolithic people and their dogs ate the same things.
Comparative seed longevity under genebank storage and artificial ageing: a case study in heteromorphic wheat wild relatives. Seeds of the same crop wild relatives species but with different shapes have different seed longevities.
Stepping up to the thermogradient plate: a data framework for predicting seed germination under climate change. But do heteromorphic seeds have different germination requirements too? Here’s how to find out.
Conservation interventions can benefit species impacted by climate change. Biodiversity was helped with the effects of climate change in 30% of cases, especially if interventions were targeted on specific species. Genebanks available for comment.
Urban conservation gardening in the decade of restoration. Speaking of interventions…
South and/or north: an indigenous seed movement in South Korea and the multiple bases of food sovereignty. Wait, what about the genebank though?
Perspectives in machine learning for wildlife conservation. Surely if you can use fancy tech and maths to monitor cheetahs, monitoring crop wild relative populations and landraces should be a doddle.
Quantifying an online wildlife trade using a web crawler. Surely if you can crawl the web for evidence of illicit wildlife trade, crawling it to evidence of genetic erosion of crop diversity should be a doddle.
Plant beta-diversity across biomes captured by imaging spectroscopy. How about capturing beta-diversity within crop fields, though? A doddle, no? We’ve come a long way since those first Anatolian farmers and their dingoes.

May 29, 2022

Trade and germplasm

Want to know why New Zealand has a huge collection of temperate forage diversity in its Margot Forde Forage Germplasm Centre, part of AgResearch Ltd? Just check out its exports on the OEC website.

I learned about the OEC’s snazzy visualisations of economic data via their addictive daily game Tradle, which invites you to guess the country based on its exports.

I think we should do a version where you guess the country based on its genebank holdings, but that’s another story.

May 23, 2022

A new organic, heterogeneous era dawns in Europe

What I forgot to do when I mentioned the Seeds4All Newsletter recently is link to their new “brochure outlining the regulatory steps to be taken in order to market OHM-labelled varieties.”

OHM?

2022 is a special year, as it will start with the entry into force of the new European Regulation on organic production, introducing the possibility of marketing seeds of ‘organic heterogeneous material’ (OHM) without any obligation to be registered in official catalogues.

We believe that this new legislation is a real advance for cultivated biodiversity and could reinforce the sustainability of organic agriculture by allowing the marketing of a greater quantity and diversity of truly organic seeds.

For these regulatory advances to be effective, it is necessary though that field operators seize them and commit to the marketing, reproduction and use of seed of organic heterogeneous material.

Bet there was a bit of resistance to that. You can download the brochure from the Seed4All website. Have fun.