Well, who isn’t right? Anyway, point is, the Coalition for Conservation Genetics has you covered with a dedicated website of resources in support of the CBD’s COP15. Extremely useful.

1. A Canadian take on Svalbard.
2. A Texas take on hemp conservation.
3. A Zimbabwean take on community seedbanks.
4. A Turkish take on genebanks.
5. An Italian take on olive conservation.
6. A Cornish take on heirloom oats.
7. A Chinese take on the CIMMYT genebank.

• Genetic diversity loss in the Anthropocene. Don’t get excited, I don’t think the method translates to cultivated species, but fancy maths says we’ve lost on average 10% of the genetic diversity within species.
• A graphical causal model for resolving species identity effects and biodiversity–ecosystem function correlations. Yeah, but don’t forget the species level diversity is important too. Or rather, diversity of functional traits among species.
• Cereal species mixtures: an ancient practice with potential for climate resilience. A review. Species level diversity in the same farmer’s field is being forgotten, and that’s bad.
• Direct and indirect effects of management and landscape on biological pest control and crop pest infestation in apple orchards. Yeah, but species diversity can be bad.
• Microbiomes in agroecosystem: Diversity, function and assembly mechanisms. Even soil microbial diversity is an important thing to not forget.
• Association analyses of host genetics, root-colonizing microbes, and plant phenotypes under different nitrogen conditions in maize. But the effects of soil microbial diversity can get quite complicated, and interact with the genetic diversity of crop plants. Which we may or may not have lost on average 10% of.

As we’ve noted a couple of times here, the INCREASE project (Intelligent Collections of Food Legumes Genetic Resources for European Agrofood Systems) includes a fantastic citizen science component. If you’re interested in taking part, registration for the third phase opens in a few days.

Last week’s The Economist has a nice piece in its Graphic Detail section on how climate change is affecting yields of some crops so much that farmers in many parts of the world will be increasingly tempted — if not compelled — to switch to different crops.

Even if more climate-resilient varieties of the crops farmers are currently growing come on-line, along with better agronomic practices, it may in some cases just be easier and more profitable to grow something else, says the article.

Like breadfruit, it adds, cheekily, before concluding, rather more constructively, that given the uncertainties involved, farmers should “learn about a wide variety of crops.”

I’d have liked to share a chart or two here, but the licensing paywall is steep, so I’ll just point to the four studies that the article references. Unlike The Economist, though, I’ll actually give the full titles, and link to the papers — Brainfood-style.

• Climate analogues suggest limited potential for intensification of production on current croplands under climate change. Major cereals are going to take a significant hit over much of their area of cultivation by 2050.
• Climate impacts on global agriculture emerge earlier in new generation of climate and crop models. Newer crop and climate models are generally more pessimistic that older ones.
• Increased food production and reduced water use through optimized crop distribution. Shifting crops around in a clever way would feed an extra 850 million people while saving water.
• Matches and mismatches between the global distribution of major food crops and climate suitability. The match between where 12 crops grow and where they grow best is stronger in richer parts of the world.

It has somehow passed me by that FAO and NordGen have been running a series of webinars on “Innovations in cryoconservation of animal genetic resources,” in support of some new FAO guidelines. The next webinar on 1 December is the seventh in the series and will cover “Legal Issues: Acquisition, Storage and Transfer of Gene Bank Material.” Recordings of previous ones, and associated presentations, are on the FAO website.

Readers may remember a recent Nibble on a report by some Big Ag head honchos saying that we’re destroying the planet and we should, you know, stop. That was met mainly by shouts of “who’s this we?” and variations thereof.

Well, so now there’s a another report by what seems to be a different set of Big Ag head honchos, but the response is predictably similar.

All grist to the COP27 mill, I guess.

You see what I did there?

1. India decides to export millets. How about conserving them?
2. India releases a new coconut. How about new millets?
3. Bhutan BOLDly studies its seed systems. Maybe even including some millets.
4. Bangladesh revives floating gardens. No millets.
5. Coffee gets an international breeding network. Do millets have one?
6. Israel‘s and New Zealand‘s genebanks make the news. How about millet genebanks?

• Thiamine improves in vitro propagation of sweetpotato [Ipomoea batatas (L.) Lam.] – confirmed with a wide range of genotypes. Getting there, keep tweaking…
• Minimizing the deleterious effects of endophytes in plant shoot tip cryopreservation. Something else to tweak.
• <em>Ex Situ Conservation of Plant Genetic Resources: An Overview of Chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) and Lentil (Lens culinaris Medik.) Worldwide Collections. Thankfully not much in vitro and cryo involved. The main tweak necessary is to share more characterization data with breeders.
• Data, Duplication, and Decentralisation: Gene Bank Management in the 1980s and 1990s. Ah, but do calls for more data also reflect attempts to cut costs and build political bridges? And would that be so bad?
• EURISCO update 2023: the European Search Catalogue for Plant Genetic Resources, a pillar for documentation of genebank material. Arguably, Eurisco tries to do all of the above, and pretty well.
• Bioinformatic Extraction of Functional Genetic Diversity from Heterogeneous Germplasm Collections for Crop Improvement. You need fancy maths to make sense of all that data. And use it.
• Research Status and Trends of Agrobiodiversity and Traditional Knowledge Based on Bibliometric Analysis (1992–Mid-2022). Not much traditional knowledge in those databases, though, eh? That would be one hell of a tweak.
• Species-tailored sampling guidelines remain an efficient method to conserve genetic diversity ex situ: A study on threatened oaks. Meanwhile, some people are still trying to figure out the best way to tweak sampling strategies to add diversity to genebanks. Spoiler alert: you need data on individual species.
• Collecting critically endangered cliff plants using a drone-based sampling manipulator. You also need drones.
• Application of Geographical Information System for PGR Management. One thing you can do with all that data is map stuff. So at least the drones know where to go.
• Incorporating evolutionary and threat processes into crop wild relatives conservation. The only thing that’s missing from this is traditional knowledge. And maybe drones.
• Conserving species’ evolutionary potential and history: opportunities under the new post-2020 global biodiversity framework. All these data will allow us to measure how well we’re doing. And whether we can ask for cryotanks, drones, and better databases.

1. Remember the book on ancient Mesopotamian cookery in the last Nibbles? Ok well here’s a website on Vegetable Oils And Animal Fats In Early Urban Societies Of Syro-Mesopotamia. Esoteric? Moi?
2. To come back down to earth, you could always read this hot take on the AGRA rebranding.
3. Couldn’t be more down to earth than community seedbanks, aka seed libraries.
4. The seeds of Dipteryx odorata will make your head float.
5. The latest news from the Musa Germplasm Information System may float your boat. It did mine. But I’m into esoterica, didn’t you know?
6. Nothing esoteric about wild peanuts any more.

The latest Eat This Newsletter is out. Here’s a taster. Do subscribe, well worth it. BTW, Jeremy has form on this topic.

The Plant Humanities Lab at Dumbarton Oaks apparently features the chilli pepper as its plant of the month this month, but as I cannot find a link there, I’m sending you to the version syndicated to JSTOR Daily. It’s a bit of a once-over-lightly, with little new for any reasonably well-informed chilli-head. While I’m carping, although the article says the seeds of wild chillies are spread by birds, it doesn’t mention any potential evolutionary advantage offered by capsaicin, the source of the heat. Clearly birds aren’t put off by it and humans can come to like it, but what is it actually for?

• Renaming Indigenous crops and addressing colonial bias in scientific language. Orphan is out, Indigenous is in.
• Vegetable Genetic Resources to Mitigate Nutritional Insecurity in India. How many of these are Indigenous as opposed to indigenous though?
• Farmers using local livestock biodiversity share more than animal genetic resources: Indications from a workshop with farmers who use local breeds. Farmers using local breeds don’t share colonial bias, I suspect. Or do they? Has anyone checked?
• Because error has a price: A systematic review of the applications of DNA fingerprinting for crop varietal identification. Nobody’s perfect, even the colonially unbiased.
• What lies behind a fruit crop variety name? A case study of the barnī date palm from al-‘Ulā oasis, Saudi Arabia. Local variety names are complicated, no wonder mistakes happen.
• Food security and the cultural heritage missing link. Want to preserve cultural heritage AND boost productivity? Then support (1) preservation of genetic resources, (2) value addition, (3) traditional food processing, (4) preference matching, and (5) agritourism. What, no fighting colonial bias?
• Analysis of Innovation in Peru’s Gastronomic Industry. All of the above?
• Food sovereignty in sub-Saharan Africa: Reality, relevance, and practicality. All of the above are well and good, but not enough. You also need modern varieties. Just get their names right, eh?
• Baladi Seeds in the oPt: Populations as Objects of Preservation and Units of Analysis. Whatever you do, don’t reduce cultural heritage to data.
• Reinventing a Tradition: East Asian Tea Cultures in the Contemporary World. No danger of reducing tea to data, judging by this collection of papers.
• Factors driving the tree species richness in sacred groves in Indian subcontinent: a review. Not religion, apparently, according to the data. Go figure.
• The role of traditional knowledge and food biodiversity to transform modern food systems. There is plenty of evidence out there that bringing greater biodiversity into food systems results in multiple socio-cultural benefits. As this Brainfood, as well as the case studies in this paper, tries to show.
• Complex agricultural landscapes host more biodiversity than simple ones: A global meta-analysis. Had enough?

1. The late Prof. Trevor Williams, one of the pioneers of genebanking, in the news.
2. The President of Niger visits a genebank, makes the news.
3. Irish seedbanking in the news.
4. Dr Mark Chapman on how to study domestication using seeds in genebanks.
5. COP27 webinar on using seeds in genebanks for climate change adaptation.
6. Pasturelands: sometimes genebanks are not enough. Though even then I bet they can help.
7. Big Food still not doing much to support genebanks, despite reports such as this.
8. A book on ancient Mesopotamian cooking. Who can think of the best link to genebanks?

I think I may have missed the PNAS paper “Current perspectives and the future of domestication studies” when it came out in 2014. I certainly can’t seem to find it on the blog here. But I’m glad it got mentioned recently on Twitter because it has something I’ve been searching for on and off for a while now: a reasonably up-to-date timeline of crop and livestock domestication. Which I’m therefore happy to reproduce here. I’d love to read a global narrative of the history of domestication linking all these together.

1. Edible Memory for free, for a month. Heirloom tomatoes and more.
2. Speaking of heirloom tomatoes… Tomatomania!: the podcast! And the website.
3. The ritual autumn BBC story on heirloom apples. Anyone for applemania?
4. Would you settle for pearmania? Perrymania actually.
5. Mania or no, crops have taken a hit this year.
6. The truth behind some buzzwords in food systems discourse from IPES-Food. Spoiler alert: agroecologymania.
7. Some cool breadfruit etc. jobs going in Hawaii at the National Tropical Botanical Garden.
8. Kent Nnadozie has a pretty cool job at the Plant Treaty, here’s an interview with him on the occasion of World Food Day.

1. Rules for tree planting.
2. Where those trees will have to come from: thousands of seed banks.
3. Not if the tree is breadfruit, but that’s ok, there’s other ways to conserve the stuff.
4. The impact of a single seed bank on rice improvement measured.
5. The impact of Irish seed banks recognized.
6. No need for genebanks to save heirloom wheats in Jordan.
7. Lost opportunity to mention peanut genebanks, but that’s ok there’s other ways to conserve the stuff.

• Needs and strategies for breeding and sustainable use of genetic resources in Opuntia. Surely there are molecular markers for spinelessness by now?
• Teosinte confers specific alleles and yield potential to maize improvement. There are 71 QTLs associated with 24 differential traits between maize and teosinte.
• A short review on sugarcane: its domestication, molecular manipulations and future perspectives. Forget sugar or fuel, the future is vaccine production.
• SNP discovery in proso millet (Panicum miliaceum L.) using low-pass genome sequencing. Ok, but why are the South Asian accessions so different from everything else?
• Meta-analysis of qualitative and quantitative trait variation in sweet watermelon and citron watermelon genetic resources. Rob citron to pay sweet watermelon.
• Genomics-informed prebreeding unlocks the diversity in genebanks for wheat improvement. How I learned to stop worrying and love non-adapted germplasm.
• Wild Sorghum as a Promising Resource for Crop Improvement. Oooh, I like the idea of de novo domestication of Australian wild sorghum species.
• Disentangling the Genetic Diversity of Grass Pea Germplasm Grown under Lowland and Highland Conditions. Always good to have multi-locational trial data, even when n=2.
• Hybridization, missing wild ancestors and the domestication of cultivated diploid bananas. Let the search for the 3 unknown wild ancestors begin!
• Improved pea reference genome and pan-genome highlight genomic features and evolutionary characteristics. If only Mendel had worked on wild peas too.
• Genetic diversity and population structure analyses of South African Bambara groundnut (Vigna subterranea [L.] Verdc) collections using SNP markers. Two heterotic groups to play around with.

1. Lots of new stuff on GRIN-U. Check out the genebank success stories in particular. How many of the things below will be successes? Lots of luck to all of them…
2. Showcasing seeds in Canada.
3. Setting up a new genebank in Jordan.
4. Let’s hope it will be eco-efficient like CIAT’s. Other GROW webinars here. Yes, they’ve started up again.
5. Embracing millets in southern Africa and India.
6. Why livestock should not follow the example of Charles II of Spain.
7. Supporting traditional sustainable farming in Central America.
8. More on Uli Westphal‘s cool illustrations of crop diversity.
9. Which include tomatoes. Don’t forget to subscribe to Jeremy’s pod.
10. And subscribe to the GRIN-U newsletter too while you’re at it!

Sorry for the relative silence lately. Work intervened, involving a longish trip to Bhutan. The specific project involved is the one we call BOLD. Check my insta for the inevitable classy pix.

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1. There’s a new cassava in town in Kenya.
2. I wonder if it will end up in a community “seed” bank.
3. …because they swear by them in Zimbabwe.
4. Cassava is not the only American crops that’s important in parts of Africa is beans: the cultural appropriation of beans in Rwanda.
5. Some American crops didn’t make it very far out of America.
6. Beans, cassava, or sump/knotweed, what’s needed is a Quality-Declared Seed (QDS) system. Right?
7. Well you also need someone to go around collecting the stuff in the first place.
8. But don’t forget to back everything up in Svalbard, like Uruguay is doing.
9. Well maybe not everything.