Many thanks to long-time friend-of-the-blog Dr Colin Khoury for this latest contribution. Conservation gap analysis using Geographic Information System (GIS) tools relies on several sources of ...

Journey through 1946's South America to find and collect wild potato plants, which might hold the key to defeat the blight ...

You know a crop has arrived when The Economist does a piece on it. Ube (Dioscorea alata), the purple yam long cherished in the Philippines, is indeed suddenly everywhere, and the newspaper for the ...

You know a crop has arrived when The Economist does a piece on it. Ube (Dioscorea alata), the purple yam long cherished in the Philippines, is indeed suddenly everywhere, and the newspaper for the ...

I decided to dig a little deeper into the climatic adaptation of Himalayan maize. You may remember from my last post on this that Genesys has 96 maize accessions from over 2000 masl in the Himalayas, ...

NordGen is running a great series of weekly webinars on crop wild relatives conservation. You can find recordings of the past three on their website, but I can’t figure out how to sign up for future ...

The National Tropical Botanical Garden (NTBG) awarded Dr. Diane Ragone, founder and director emerita of NTBG’s Breadfruit Institute 1, the 2024 David Fairchild Medal for Plant Exploration. Dr. Ragone ...

Quick follow-up to my post a few days ago on the recent study of the origin of the collard greens grown in the Moroccan oases of the Draa and Ziz valleys. Alas, that might in practice turn out to be ...

Usually, if plant breeders do anything at all with wild species, they use them to try to improve the domesticated relative in some way. But in Bajra–Napier Hybrids (BNH), it’s actually the crop that ...

Well, it’s all over now, and very moving it was too. You can read about the 2024 World Food Prize laureates here, and also watch edited highlights of the ceremony. Wonderful to see Cary and Geoff — ...

Never rains but it pours. Along very similar lines as the previous post on a fun effort to document people’s favourite breadfruit varieties, here comes the FruitDev project’s Wild Fruit Population of ...

A very interesting, wide-ranging review in New Scientist makes the point that fungi were not for ancient humans the marginal resources that their near invisibility in the traditional archaeological ...