We all know that agrobiodiversity conservation is done, in its different ways, both on farms and in genebanks. But it may be that the most interesting – and intractable – bit of the process is what ha...

Land sparing is a seductive story. Farmers become more productive. We need less land to produce the same amount of food. The land we no longer need can be spared for nature. No need for that tricky la...

A daily game that challenges our understanding of human cultures. Ten objects. 5,000 years of human history. Guess where and when each artifact was made. See how you rank.

Genebank data seems to be in the air. Just in the past few days, I pontificated about descriptors, Mike Jackson has reminisced about the early days of rice molecular markers and CGIAR announced a big ...

Haga Hideo’s 1950s photos of Fukushima farming rituals are now being used to revive them: ex situ conservation, but for culture. Long before photography, or “pre‑breeding” was a buzzword, Belgian pomo...

Editorial: Food matters. Antiquity's editorial puts food at the centre of archaeology, a window onto societies, economies, identities and power: a fair place to start a run of items that dig into the ...

Two recent stories about Indigenous seed rematriation sparked some reminiscing, and a reflection about what genebanks might need to do differently. In her Ambrook piece, Emma Glassman-Hughes follows t...

Newly recovered sheeppox sequences reveal when and how the virus emerged

And how they might have helped save the future of American apples

A new opinion paper in Plants, People, Planet argues that the world's two main plant conservation communities, botanic gardens and genebanks, need to work far more closely together to protect the plan...

We have access to more kinds of food plants, yet the world’s diets and production systems have never been more alike. That is the paradox at the heart of Food plant diversity in a rapidly changing wor...

We have never had access to more kinds of food plants, yet the world’s diets and production systems have never been more alike. That is the paradox at the heart of Food plant diversity in a rapidly ch...

Colin Khoury is the Global Conservation Lead Coordinator of the Global Conservation Consortium for Food Plants. With increasing threats to plant diversity limiting our options for developing healthier and more resilient food systems, new papers in Plant...

Seeing the new Tree Seed and Seedling Field Guide Series from the Landscape Alliance reminded me that I’d also meant to write about the International Principles and Standards for Native Seeds in Ecolo...

China is building its germplasm collection at the National Frigid Zone Crop and Soybean Germplasm Resources Mid-term Bank in Harbin. Cool. Driscoll’s helped build China’s blueberry industry, then disc...

The “nutrient collapse” story has been doing the rounds for years, and we’ve been picking at it on the blog for almost as long. Back in 2009, Jeremy looked at evidence that older crop varieties could ...

Hello In today’s harvest, the knotty question of organic goodness, multiple celebrations of autumn’s apples, hunger — visible and hidden, global and local —...

A three-decade-long analysis shows rising threatened species and responsibility gaps in global supply chains. Data says that we must make responsibility for biodiversity traceable from production to f...

Looks like all those factsheets came through...

There’s a paper out that's worth getting to grips with if you are interested in genebanks having an impact, even though it never actually mentions genebanks. David Pannell’s Reflections on Adoption of...

The 2026 ʻUlu Hoʻolauleʻa and Global Breadfruit Summit is taking place in South Kona, Hawaiʻi, from 19-24 September 2026. The week-long celebration will bring together breadfruit farmers, farmer organ...

Test your geography skills in HexHunt. Find seven locations each day by choosing the hex on the map where you think they are. How accurate and precise can you get?

A daily game that challenges our understanding of human cultures. Ten objects. 5,000 years of human history. Guess where and when each artifact was made. See how you rank.

Seventeen years after we first blogged about the sad fate of the Iraqi national genebank at Abu Ghraib, it has re-opened. That made me happy. It goes with one in Sulaymaniyah that was opened a few wee...

There’s a paper out that's worth getting to grips with if you are interested in genebanks having an impact, even though it never actually mentions genebanks. David Pannell’s Reflections on Adoption of...

Join Breadfruit Celebration 2026 in South Kona, Hawaii. Explore cutting-edge research, industry innovation, and the rich history of the $45M kalu‘ulu agroforest.

Cantabria is putting the Pasiega cow in the bank. Just in case. Spain’s “goat-cows” are fighting wildfires the old-fashioned way: by eating the fuel. I hope they're in the bank too. India has made a B...

The USDA has decided to close its iconic flagship site, the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center (BARC) in Maryland. Everyone in plant genetic resources knows what "Beltsville" means. Cost is appar...

Archaeologists find evidence in Indonesia of a human who appeared to use betel nut for its psychoactive properties up to 25,000 years ago.

There's a wave of groundwork being laid -- genomic, cultural, and geospatial -- for opportunity crops, but the governance, disease-pressure, market and environmental constraints that marginalized them...

In an earlier post I argued that the crop diversity conservation and use system has a missing middle: someone whose job it is to get the whole way from an agricultural problem to a diversity-based sol...

A daily game that challenges our understanding of human cultures. Ten objects. 5,000 years of human history. Guess where and when each artifact was made. See how you rank.

Genebank data seems to be in the air. Just in the past few days, I pontificated about descriptors, Mike Jackson has reminisced about the early days of rice molecular markers and CGIAR announced a big ...

I came across a study that uses a particularly clever form of longitudinal visual ethnography. Researchers returned, after about 15 years, to the same Australian livestock producers and the same locat...

Frafra potato is having a moment: an indigenous West African tuber, adored locally and mostly ignored by science, out looking for its big commercial break. Speaking of breakthroughs, this bus driver f...

Genebank data seems to be in the air. Just in the past few days, I pontificated about descriptors, Mike Jackson has reminisced about the early days of rice molecular markers and CGIAR announced a big ...

YouTube video by PerryCoxPF93

Play MapTap - the daily geography game! Find 5 world locations on a 3D globe with historical stories. Free browser-based daily game for geography lovers.

Genebank data seems to be in the air. Just in the past few days, I pontificated about descriptors, Mike Jackson has reminisced about the early days of rice molecular markers and CGIAR announced a big ...