Historical Indigenous Land-Use Explains Plant Functional Trait Diversity

Human land-use legacies have long-term effects on plant community composition and ecosystem function. While ancient and historical land use is known to affect biodiversity patterns, it is unknown whether such legacies affect other plant community properties such as the diversity of functional traits. Functional traits are a critical tool for understanding ecological communities because they give insights into community assembly processes as well as potential species interactions and other ecosystem functions. Here, we present the first systematic study evaluating how plant functional trait distributions and functional diversity are affected by ancient and historical Indigenous forest management in the Pacific Northwest. We compare forest garden ecosystems - managed perennial fruit and nut communities associated exclusively with archaeological village sites - with surrounding periphery conifer forests. We find that forest gardens have substantially greater plant and functional trait diversity than periphery forests even more than 150 years after management ceased. Forests managed by Indigenous peoples in the past now provide diverse resources and habitat for animals and other pollinators and are more rich than naturally forested ecosystems. Although ecological studies rarely incorporate Indigenous land-use legacies, the positive effects of Indigenous land use on contemporary functional and taxonomic diversity that we observe provide some of the strongest evidence yet that Indigenous management practices are tied to ecosystem health and resilience.&nbsp

Anthropological contributions to historical ecology: 50 questions, infinite prospects.

This paper presents the results of a consensus-driven process identifying 50 priority research questions for historical ecology obtained through crowdsourcing, literature reviews, and in-person workshopping. A deliberative approach was designed to maximize discussion and debate with defined outcomes. Two in-person workshops (in Sweden and Canada) over the course of two years and online discussions were peer facilitated to define specific key questions for historical ecology from anthropological and archaeological perspectives. The aim of this research is to showcase the variety of questions that reflect the broad scope for historical-ecological research trajectories across scientific disciplines. Historical ecology encompasses research concerned with decadal, centennial, and millennial human-environmental interactions, and the consequences that those relationships have in the formation of contemporary landscapes. Six interrelated themes arose from our consensus-building workshop model: (1) climate and environmental change and variability; (2) multi-scalar, multi-disciplinary; (3) biodiversity and community ecology; (4) resource and environmental management and governance; (5) methods and applications; and (6) communication and policy. The 50 questions represented by these themes highlight meaningful trends in historical ecology that distill the field down to three explicit findings. First, historical ecology is fundamentally an applied research program. Second, this program seeks to understand long-term human-environment interactions with a focus on avoiding, mitigating, and reversing adverse ecological effects. Third, historical ecology is part of convergent trends toward transdisciplinary research science, which erodes scientific boundaries between the cultural and natural

The evolutionary history of wild, domesticated, and feral Brassica oleracea (Brassicaceae)

Understanding the evolutionary history of crops, including identifying wild relatives, helps to provide insight for conservation and crop breeding efforts. Cultivated Brassica oleracea has intrigued researchers for centuries due to its wide diversity in forms, which include cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, kale, kohlrabi, and Brussels sprouts. Yet, the evolutionary history of this species remains understudied. With such different vegetables produced from a single species, B. oleracea is a model organism for understanding the power of artificial selection. Persistent challenges in the study of B. oleracea include conflicting hypotheses regarding domestication and the identity of the closest living wild relative. Using newly generated RNA-seq data for a diversity panel of 224 accessions, which represents 14 different B. oleracea crop types and nine potential wild progenitor species, we integrate phylogenetic and population genetic techniques with ecological niche modeling, archaeological, and literary evidence to examine relationships among cultivars and wild relatives to clarify the origin of this horticulturally important species. Our analyses point to the Aegean endemic B. cretica as the closest living relative of cultivated B. oleracea, supporting an origin of cultivation in the Eastern Mediterranean region. Additionally, we identify several feral lineages, suggesting that cultivated plants of this species can revert to a wild-like state with relative ease. By expanding our understanding of the evolutionary history in B. oleracea, these results contribute to a growing body of knowledge on crop domestication that will facilitate continued breeding efforts including adaptation to changing environmental conditions

Building a feral future: Open questions in crop ferality.

The phenomenon of feral crops, that is, free-living populations that have established outside cultivation, is understudied. Some researchers focus on the negative consequences of domestication, whereas others assert that feral populations may serve as useful pools of genetic diversity for future crop improvement. Although research on feral crops and the process of feralization has advanced rapidly in the last two decades, generalizable insights have been limited by a lack of comparative research across crop species and other factors. To improve international coordination of research on this topic, we summarize the current state of feralization research and chart a course for future study by consolidating outstanding questions in the field. These questions, which emerged from the colloquium “Darwins' reversals: What we now know about Feralization and Crop Wild Relatives” at the BOTANY 2021 conference, fall into seven categories that span both basic and applied research: (1) definitions and drivers of ferality, (2) genetic architecture and pathway, (3) evolutionary history and biogeography, (4) agronomy and breeding, (5) fundamental and applied ecology, (6) collecting and conservation, and (7) taxonomy and best practices. These questions serve as a basis for ferality researchers to coordinate research in these areas, potentially resulting in major contributions to food security in the face of climate change

Historical ecology of forest garden management in Laxyuubm Ts’msyen and beyond

ABSTRACTCultural land-use is an important driver of ecosystem change, influencing the composition of species across landscapes and through time. Recent research in northwestern North America has shown that historical Indigenous land-use and forest management has resulted in relict forest gardens dominated by edible fruit, nut, and berry producing trees and shrubs – many of which continue to grow adjacent to archaeological village sites today. Our research combines archaeological and ecological methods to better understand the historical ecology of seven forest gardens in the Pacific Northwest. Vascular plant communities at all sites are evaluated for distinctiveness using ANOSIM, NMDS, and indicator species analyses. We identify 15 forest garden indicator species, all of which are culturally significant edible fruit or root-bearing species. We then present the results of an intensive historical-ecological study of one site in Laxyuubm Gitselasu (Ts’msyen). Paleoethnobotanical data, soil and tree ring analyses, and radiocarbon dates show that forest management in the Gitsaex forest garden of Gitselasu pre-dates settler colonialism and shows that people likely modified soils and otherwise enhanced their immediate environment to increase the productivity of desired plant species. Given the importance of Indigenous peoples’ role in sustaining forested foodsheds, there is an ongoing and urgent need to support their revitalization and management and better understand the integrated cultural practices and ecological processes that result in these vast cultural landscapes

Transcriptome and organellar sequencing highlights the complex origin and diversification of allotetraploid Brassica napus

Brassica napus, an allotetraploid crop, is hypothesized to be a hybrid from unknown varieties of Brassica rapa and Brassica oleracea. Despite the economic importance of B. napus, much is unresolved regarding its phylogenomic relationships, genetic structure, and diversification. Here we conduct a comprehensive study among diverse accessions from 183 B. napus (including rapeseed, rutabaga, and Siberian kale), 112 B. rapa, and 62 B. oleracea and its wild relatives. Using RNA-seq of B. napus accessions, we define the genetic diversity and sub-genome variance of six genetic clusters. Nuclear and organellar phylogenies for B. napus and its progenitors reveal varying patterns of inheritance and post-formation introgression. We discern regions with signatures of selective sweeps and detect 8,187 differentially expressed genes with implications for B. napus diversification. This study highlights the complex origin and evolution of B. napus providing insights that can further facilitate B. napus breeding and germplasm preservation

The global relevance of locally grounded ethnobiology

Unidad de excelencia María de Maeztu CEX2019-000940-MWhile ethnobiology is a discipline that focuses on the local, it has an outstanding, but not yet fully realized potential to address global issues. Part of this unrealized potential is that universalistic approaches often do not fully recognize culturally grounded perspectives and there are multiple challenges with scaling up place-based research. However, scalability is paramount to ensure that the intimate and context-specific diversity of human-environmental relationships and understandings are recognized in global-scale planning and policy development. Here, we identify four pathways to enable the scalability of place-based ethnobiological research from the ground up: local-to-global dialogues, aggregation of published data, multi-sited studies, and geospatial analyses. We also discuss some major challenges and consideration to encourage continuous reflexivity in these endeavours and to ensure that scalability does not contribute to unnecessarily decontextualizing, co-opting, or overwriting the epistemologies of Indigenous Peoples and local communities. As ethnobiology navigates multiple scales of time and space and seeks to increase its breadth, this study shows that the use of deliberately global approaches, when carefully nested within rich field-based and ecological and ethnographically grounded data, can contribute to: (1) upscaling case-specific insights to unveil global patterns and dynamics in the biocultural contexts of Indigenous Peoples and local communities; (2) bringing ethnobiological knowledge into resolutions that can influence global environmental research and policy agendas; and (3) enriching ethnobiology's field-based ethos with a deliberate global analytical focus

Brassica rapa Domestication: Untangling Wild and Feral Forms and Convergence of Crop Morphotypes.

The study of domestication contributes to our knowledge of evolution and crop genetic resources. Human selection has shaped wild Brassica rapa into diverse turnip, leafy, and oilseed crops. Despite its worldwide economic importance and potential as a model for understanding diversification under domestication, insights into the number of domestication events and initial crop(s) domesticated in B. rapa have been limited due to a lack of clarity about the wild or feral status of conspecific noncrop relatives. To address this gap and reconstruct the domestication history of B. rapa, we analyzed 68,468 genotyping-by-sequencing-derived single nucleotide polymorphisms for 416 samples in the largest diversity panel of domesticated and weedy B. rapa to date. To further understand the center of origin, we modeled the potential range of wild B. rapa during the mid-Holocene. Our analyses of genetic diversity across B. rapa morphotypes suggest that noncrop samples from the Caucasus, Siberia, and Italy may be truly wild, whereas those occurring in the Americas and much of Europe are feral. Clustering, tree-based analyses, and parameterized demographic inference further indicate that turnips were likely the first crop type domesticated, from which leafy types in East Asia and Europe were selected from distinct lineages. These findings clarify the domestication history and nature of wild crop genetic resources for B. rapa, which provides the first step toward investigating cases of possible parallel selection, the domestication and feralization syndrome, and novel germplasm for Brassica crop improvement