Plant diversification can make an important contribution to ecological intensification and the sustainable use of associated ecosystem services in an urban ecosystem.
After domestication, the cultivation range expansion of crops was not solely dictated by human activity but instead constrained by climatic factors, which in turn resulted in distinct phenotypic characteristics of locally adaptive landraces.
New archaeobotanical data from Negev Highland rubbish middens demonstrate that crop diversity in the Southern Levant expanded more during the first millennium CE than in any earlier period, yet with minimal consequences for consumption and production patterns.
Julia M Kreiner, George Sandler ... Stephen I Wright
The spread of herbicide resistance in one of the most problematic weeds in North America occurs through both recent, repeated mutational origins and gene flow across an international network of agricultural fields.
A consistent pattern of consumption of Triticeae tribe grasses documented in the Danube Gorges of the Balkans since the Early Mesolithic might have facilitated a quick uptake of domesticated cereals due to a developed cultural taste and specific stone tool processing technology.
The genome sequence of Trichoplusia ni enables the use of this widespread lepidopteran pest as a model for both the study of small RNA pathways and insecticide resistance.
Aquatic animals cocultured with rice in paddy ecosystems can increase food production, improve nitrogen (N)-use efficiency, and maintain soil fertility by reducing weeds, and promoting recycle and complementary use of N.
Rarity metrics reveal pervasive negative impacts of agricultural land use on soil invertebrate communities, whereas widely-used richness and diversity metrics underestimate the magnitude of these impacts.
By leveraging quantitative environmental DNA metabarcoding and ecological network analysis, influential organisms in rice fields are identified, thereby revealing potential avenues for environmentally friendly agricultural practices.
Mapping functional relationships between multiple ecosystem services (ES) reveals previously unidentified areas of high ES value, which suggests that the spatial focus of planning for optimal ES provisioning may shift when relationships between several ES are considered.
