Agricultural Biodiversity
2,486 FOLLOWERS
Keeping a close eye on biodiversity in agriculture, including crops, livestock and wild relatives, for food security and sustainability. Our aim is to collect in one place anything we find on the internet that relates somehow to the notion of agricultural biodiversity.
Agricultural Biodiversity
2d ago
Understanding the role of biodiversity in the climate, food, water, energy, transport and health nexus in Europe. Meta-analysis shows that a lot of things people do affect biodiversity negatively, yet biodiversity affects most things people want to do positively.
Food Systems Interventions for Nutrition: Lessons from 6 Program Evaluations in Africa and South Asia. Have a strong theory of change, assess a range of outcomes, triangulate methods, including those from other fields, use adaptive and flexible evaluation designs, and document everything transparently. I wonder how many of these boxe ..read more
Agricultural Biodiversity
1w ago
There’s a new international treaty on the block. World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) members have just approved the Treaty on Intellectual Property, Genetic Resources and Associated Traditional Knowledge. What does it do? It’s basically about disclosing where genetic resources came from when claiming a patent.
Broadly, where a claimed invention in a patent application is based on genetic resources, each contracting party shall require applicants to disclose the country of origin or source of the genetic resources. Where the claimed invention in a patent application is based on tra ..read more
Agricultural Biodiversity
3w ago
The genebank of the International Livestock Research Institute in Addis Ababa is 40 years old. There’s an online celebration tomorrow. See you there.
Photo credit: Shawn Landersz, Consultant at The Global Crop Diversity Trust
Oh, and probably coincidentally, you can read about ILRI’s forage work in Somalia in the latest newsletter from the Seed Systems Group ..read more
Agricultural Biodiversity
3w ago
Global spatially explicit yield gap time trends reveal regions at risk of future crop yield stagnation. For 8 of 10 major crops, yield gaps have widened steadily from 1975 to 2010 over most areas, and remained static for sugar cane and oil palm. Time to turbo-charge the breeding?
Domestication and the evolution of crops: variable syndromes, complex genetic architectures, and ecological entanglements. If you want to turbo-charge breeding, you need to understand (among other things) the ecological context of domestication.
Including Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) in Agricultural Researc ..read more
Agricultural Biodiversity
3w ago
Great to see a couple of my former bosses recognized for their exceptional contributions to the conservation on crop diversity.
I like this quote from Geoff:
This is really a chance to get that message out and say, look, this relatively small amount of money is our insurance policy, our insurance policy that we’re going to be able to feed the world in 50 years ..read more
Agricultural Biodiversity
1M ago
The paper “Forgotten food crops in sub-Saharan Africa for healthy diets in a changing climate” by Maarten van Zonneveld, Roeland Kindt, Stepha McMullin, Enoch G. Achigan-Dako, Sognigbé N’Danikou, Wei-hsun Hsieh, Yann-rong Lin, and Ian K. Dawson has won the PNAS 2023 Cozzarelli Prize for the best paper of the year in Applied Biological, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences. Here’s the abstract:
As the climate changes, major staple crop production in sub-Saharan Africa becomes increasingly vulnerable. Underutilized traditional food plants offer opportunities for diversifying cropping system ..read more
Agricultural Biodiversity
1M ago
Benjamin Nowak, a “French lecturer in agronomy with teaching and research activities focused on soil sciences and remote sensing for crop monitoring” has a nice infographic showing “what a large farm would look like, growing all the world’s crops.” Pretty cool. But where’s all the ganja?
A high-resolution version is available ..read more
Agricultural Biodiversity
1M ago
From Dr Pat Byrne, Professor Emeritus of Plant Breeding and Genetics at Colorado State University.
Colorado State University Online will offer 3 one-credit courses in Fall 2024 on Plant Genetic Resources Conservation and Use. Courses are targeted to the upper undergraduate/graduate student level and can be taken sequentially or independently. Course instructors are Dr Geoff Morris (CSU), Dr Davina Rhodes (CSU), and Dr Gayle Volk (USDA-ARS). The courses are as follows:
SOCR 501 – Plant Genetic Resources: Origins, Aug. 19 – Sep. 22. Discover the origins of plant genetic resources, their domesti ..read more
Agricultural Biodiversity
1M ago
Nice video celebrating seeds.
Nice old video about Kew Gardens.
Tracing the origins of Indonesian cassava. No, it wasn’t introduced by Kew, but yes, colonialism was involved.
Latest data on where crops are grown. Including cassava.
Self Help Africa director turns on to neglected crops. Including cassava.
New lab in Kenya for spreading clean crops around. Including cassava?
Türkiye’s genebank in the news. No cassava.
Nepalese rice gets a Welsh upgrade.
Collecting sugarcane in French Polynesia to (eventually) support local booze industry.
Long live the ancient booze bandwagon.
Garlic 101 ..read more