Agricultural Biodiversity Weblog

October 23, 2026

Getting to the hub of seed saving

It seems every new website these days is a hub or an academy. The latest example that has come across my desk is the Seed Knowledge Hub developed by the Erasmus+ project Seeds of Growth: Strengthening Community Seed Banks and Sustainable Seed-Saving Practices in Europe.

The Hub brings together guides, technical manuals, case studies and policy materials on seed saving and cultivated diversity. What was included into it was decided on the basis of a capacity gap analysis that reached 868 people across Europe and collected 140 responses from seed savers, community seed bank managers and seed librarians.

You can subscribe to keep up to date.

October 20, 2026October 21, 2026

Plant Cuttings regrows

We used to link quite a bit to Plant Cuttings, Nigel Chaffey’s monthly column in the international scientific journal Annals of Botany. It was also shared on Botany One, a weblog run by the publisher of the journal. Here’s an example of one of our shoutouts, from 16 years ago no less.

Dr Chaffey always had something interesting to say, and following his column was a great pleasure. So I thought it was a real pity when it came to an end in 2019, after about a decade.

It turns out, though, that Plant Cuttings continues. A random post on social media linking to Dr Chaffey’s latest piece, a review of what sounds like an excellent book on basketry, led me to the current incarnation. You can subscribe to it, which I have done, and of course explore the archive of the column at Botany One.

October 20, 2026October 19, 2026

A seven-course meal of neglected crops

Good news for those who want to learn more about opportunity crops, aka neglected and underutilized species:

This seven-course series curriculum equips participants with competences required to transform Neglected and Underutilized Species (NUS) into sustainable careers, commercial enterprises, and resilient food systems. Developed by African university experts and global partners, and hosted asynchronously on the RUFORUM e-Learning Platform (REP), each self-paced course awards its own certificate of completion and offers flexible adoption options for higher education institutions, whether deployed as standalone credentials, embedded into degree programmes, or used as core supplementary resources.

You do have to register, but I’ve tried it and it’s fairly painless.

I can’t say I like those images much, but the contents of the courses themselves do not betray use of AI. Here are the topics that are treated by each:

Climate and biodiversity
Nutrition and health
Business development
Postharvest and processing
Production and agronomy
Foundations and systems
Policy and food systems

October 19, 2026October 19, 2026

The gourd, the bred and the citrus

Jeremy’s latest newsletter includes a link to a piece on the domestication of cucurbits¹ that reminded him of a classic of evolutionary biology and reminded me that I meant to link to The Botanist in the Kitchen’s own autumnal foray into Halloween pumpkins et al. It also alerted me to what promises to be a phenomenal eight-part exploration of citrus diversity in Sicily by Erik Grouger.

October 19, 2026October 17, 2026

Brainfood: WorldCuP, Crop origins, Abrahamic plants, UK landraces double, Ex situ change, Santorini vineyards, Apulian olives

WorldCuP: A database of checklists documenting the World’s Cultivated Plants and their distributions. Cool new database records 1,444,325 occurrences representing 91,358 accepted cultivated plant species across 2,718 regions in 156 countries. Geographic coverage is extensive but uneven, with notable gaps in parts of Africa, southwest and central Asia, and Oceania. Most of the taxa recorded are not in existing major crop and useful-plant databases.
Integrating multiple disciplines to locate the origins of domestication of crops. Combining evidence from botany, biogeography, genetics, archaeology, linguistics, and history overturns the traditional Mesoamerican hypothesis for cacao origins, supporting domestication in western Amazonia, probably involving multiple events. Peach palm’s domestication is best placed in southwestern Amazonia. Cupuaçu remains unresolved. Now for the other 91,355 species.
Plant Species Mentioned in Abrahamic Scriptures: Implications for Biodiversity and Traditional Agriculture and Horticulture. Olive, grapevine and fig, together with cereals such as wheat and barley, occur prominently across the three scriptural traditions examined, while date palm is particularly prominent in the Qur’an. Not clear whether scriptures qualify as checklists.
Crop landrace conservation, status, challenges and motivations in Great Britain. A national inventory (checklist even) identifies 566 landrace populations maintained on farms by 197 growers, alongside 1,876 British-origin genebank accessions, representing a total of 1,201 distinct landraces. Cereal and vegetable landrace cultivation has gone up since 2004, but forage diversity is increasingly threatened. Climate change, labour shortages and lower yields are the main challenges reported by growers.
An inventory, threat and conservation assessment of UK wheat landrace diversity. The UK currently has 27 wheat landrace varieties growing on more than 700 hectares, an increase in both variety numbers and cultivated area since 2009. Interviews with 50 farmers identify insufficient market demand and limited seed availability as key constraints. So, not climate change, labour shortages and lower yields.
Strong differentiation between source and ex situ populations of rare plant species revealed by next-generation sequencing. Across four rare plant species, ex situ populations showed significant genetic differentiation from their wild sources despite only one generation in cultivation, while overall genetic diversity and inbreeding did not differ significantly. Unrepresentative seed collection, unconscious selection during propagation or genetic drift could explain the differences. Something to test on all those British landraces, labour permitting?
Rethinking the vineyard of Santorini in a changing climate and preserving an historic wine region. Recommends a staged transition from vineyard recovery to ecological regeneration, prioritising soil organic matter, drought management and indigenous grapevine diversity. Sounds like lots of labour will be needed.
Conservation dilemmas: Xylella fastidiosa and the future(s) of olive farming. In Puglia, disease management is pushing olive farming towards competing futures: intensive, mechanised production vs the preservation of ancient trees as cultural landscapes. The fate of traditional groves depends less on technical disease solutions than on whether markets, subsidies and labour arrangements make their continued care economically viable. Well that doesn’t sound promising. Maybe try prayer?