Histories of Crops, between Niche Construction, Domestication and Diversification

Dear Colleagues,

Over the last twelve thousand years, more than two thousand plant species have been domesticated worldwide. Domestication was driven by a multitude of environmental, climatic, and cultural factors, which ultimately led plants to thrive in human-made niches while losing the ability to propagate in natural settings. The study of major crops thus far has enabled the identification of 11 different regions where plants were independently domesticated, but studies on the domestication process of most crops are unconcluded and uncertainties persist on their original area of distribution and their patterns of diversification. The increasing corpus of agronomic, genomic, archaeobotanical, and ethnographic data can provide crucial information on these issues, and overall advance our understanding of domestication processes on a global scale.

With this Special Issue of Agronomy, we seek integrative studies that shed light on the origin and diversification of understudied crops, as well as reviews that offer original perspectives on the domestication of major crops. Furthermore, we encourage contributions that investigate the cultural, social, and linguistic background of domestication to create a comprehensive history of the origin and early development of agriculture.

Dr. Valentina Caracuta
Prof. Dr. Roberto Papa
Prof. Dr. Ferran Antolin
Guest Editors

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