- Back to basics: Considerations in evaluating the outcomes of community forestry. You don’t need fancy indicators.
- Plant exploitation of the last foragers at Shizitan in the Middle Yellow River Valley China: Evidence from grinding stones. Remains of starch and patterns of wear on grinding stones show that Paleolithic people in China used a lot of plants, in a lot of ways.
- Phenotypic diversity and identification of wild Arachis accessions with useful agronomic and nutritional traits. Our friends at ICRISAT identify the top 20 wild peanut accessions.
- Taxonomy and genetic diversity of domesticated Capsicum species in the Andean region. AFLPs and SSRs clarify some taxonomic issues, but show high diversity not just in Bolivia, the putative centre of origin. No top 20 though.
- From forest to field: Perennial fruit crop domestication. They’re like annuals in some respects, different in others. Perhaps most interestingly, their domestication bottleneck wasn’t so much of one.
- Allelopathic potential of Triticum spp., Secale spp. and Triticosecale spp. and use of chromosome substitutions and translocations to improve weed suppression ability in winter wheat. Low in wheat, but high in some rye accessions, and transferrable.
- Genotyping and evaluation of local olive varieties of a climatically disfavoured region through molecular, morphological and oil quality parameters. Eight minor varieties could be less so.
Rupestrine Roman agrobiodiversity
Capparis on this occasion. But I’ve also seen figs, pomegranate and assorted crop wild relatives growing on walls. Time for a serious survey?
Chile Pepper Fiesta 2011
Chile Pepper Fiesta 2011, a set by Brooklyn Botanic Garden on Flickr.
Looks like fun…
UK genebank on BBC Radio 4
Mike Ambrose manages the UK’s largest seed collection based at the John Innes Centre in Norwich.
With a collection of 25,000 seeds from around the world, he tells Caz how looking into the past helps meet the ‘wish-list’ criteria of plant breeders today.
That’s from the Programme Details for this morning’s Farming Today, on BBC Radio 4. I’m sure they have more than 25,000 seeds, but that’s just a quibble. 1 Did Mike Ambrose really say that the John Innes genebank has seen a 7% year-on-year increase in requests for seed? How much of that went to farmers, I wonder, rather than to breeders.
Is it a trend yet?
May 23, 2011: “Each kit provides enough seed for one household to grow vegetables on 100 m2 of land to provide a balanced supply of protein and micronutrients during the initial months after a disaster.”
June 19, 2011: “…offers farmers the opportunity to buy different varieties of previously forgotten under-utilised seeds, more suitable for the area. They supply them in smaller quantities so farmers aren’t over reliant on one crop.”
June 21, 2011: “I think it could have an enormous impact if we could fill those seed packages with hundreds of different varieties to be tried by farmers, young and old. Now that would boost on-farm crop diversity.”
August 8, 2011: “Including seeds of local crop varieties in relief-seed packages distributed to smallscale farmers after natural calamities could help indigenous crop diversity rebound faster.”
August 17, 2011: “‘We tell farmers that diversifying to more drought resistant crops is key to cope with the changing climate,’ Leakey says. To encourage them, she offers a ‘Leldet Bouquet:’ Instead of 2kg maize seeds costing 300 Kenyan shillings ($3), the farmer can get a mix of five seed packets with an equivalent weight of cowpeas, sorghum, beans, pigeon pea, millet and maize. The mix of crops in the ‘bouquet’ is adapted to the farmer’s location.”