A Facebook post from the Canada Agriculture and Food Museum on Faith Fyles, botanist and botanical artist, and the first woman assistant botanist in the federal Department of Agriculture (1911), leads to a treasure trove of interesting stuff.
Brainfood: US edition
- Vulnerability of U.S. new and industrial crop genetic resources. More germplasm (especially wild relatives) and breeders are needed in the US of castor bean, gumweed, guar, guayule, kenaf, roselle, safflower, sesame, sunn hemp, rubber dandelion and Vernonia.
- Safeguarding Plant Genetic Resources in the U.S. But the conservation system itself has its challenges, due to climate change.
- Operationalizing cultural adaptation to climate change: contemporary examples from United States agriculture. But climate change is not the only thing that agriculture (and possibly the conservation system too) needs to adapt to.
- Efforts to cryopreserve shrimp (Penaeid) genetic resources and the potential for a shrimp germplasm bank in the United States. Sure, why not, let them eat shrimp.
- Mother Tubers of Wild Potato Solanum jamesii can Make Shoots Five Times. Are enough populations of this thing in genebanks, I wonder? No, not compared to shrimps.
- ‘Hybrid’ US sheep breeder used endangered genetic material, faces jail. Yes, I know this is not peer-reviewed, but would you have left it out of this American round-up?
Vamping with VACS
The global movement that is the Vision for Adapted Crops and Soils (VACS) has two new reports out and a nifty interactive website.
Investing in underutilized indigenous and traditional corps can strengthen climate resilience and nutrition across the African continent. A portfolio of these crops is essential for regional food security and can improve local resilience in the face of changing weather patterns.
Which we’ve been saying for years here, of course.
How to get training in crop diversity conservation redux
Every once in a while I get the urge to remind everyone where they can get information on training courses in crop diversity conservation, and indeed training materials.
So, anyway, of course there’s the Plant Treaty. A couple of online courses are available, on the Treaty itself and on Farmers’ Rights.
Then there’s USDA’s GRIN-U. Great range of topics, materials and formats.
The Millennium Seed Bank Partnership at Kew Gardens also has a bunch of training opportunities.
And finally there’s BGCI’s Online Training Platform. You need to register for the online courses but it’s worth it.
It’s kind of crazy that there isn’t a more formal place than a random blog post where different organizations can share opportunities and direct people to the right training for them, but there we are.
LATER: Oh gosh, how could I forget CGN’s courses? And indeed other offers from Wageningen, such as this on seed systems.
EVEN LATER: There’s also the Applied Plant Conservation Course from the Center for Plant Conservation.
AND FINALLY… the MS in Plant Genetic Resources Conservation and Management from the Crop Breeding and Genetic Resources Laboratory, Institute of Crop Science, College of Agriculture and Food Science, University of the Philippines, Los Baños.
Brainfood: Landrace threats, Heritage areas, Bean erosion, Rice restoration, Cassava redundancy, Commercialization, Peanut network, Podolian cattle
- Towards a practical threat assessment methodology for crop landraces. Basically red listing for landraces.
- Preserving traditional systems: Identification of agricultural heritage areas based on agro-biodiversity. First places to apply the above?
- Genetic erosion within the Fabada dry bean market class revealed by high-throughput genotyping. Would have been nice to apply the above before doing this study.
- Restoration of the traditional high-altitude rice variety Dumbja in Bhutan. Highlights one of the problems with monitoring threats to landraces, i.e. how to define the landrace.
- Identifying genetically redundant accessions in the world’s largest cassava collection. About half of over 5000 genebank accessions were unique. Easier to recognize cassava landraces I guess.
- Agricultural commercialisation among women smallholder farmers in Nigeria: Implication for food security. Will commercialization help preserve some landraces but threaten others?
- The groundnut improvement network for Africa (GINA) germplasm collection: a unique genetic resource for breeding and gene discovery. Over a thousand accessions that will be just fine.
- An Appropriate Genetic Approach to Endangered Podolian Grey Cattle in the Context of Preserving Biodiversity and Sustainable Conservation of Genetic Resources. The livestock people monitor threat to breeds all the time, it seems.