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Crop origins explain variation in global agricultural relevance

Abstract

Human food production is dominated globally by a small number of crops. Why certain crops have attained high agricultural relevance while others have remained minor might partially stem from their different origins. Here, we analyse a dataset of 866 crops to show that seed crops and species originating from seasonally dry environments tend to have the greatest agricultural relevance, while phylogenetic affinities play a minor role. These patterns are nuanced by root and leaf crops and herbaceous fruit crops having older origins in the aseasonal tropics. Interestingly, after accounting for these effects, we find that older crops are more likely to be globally important and are cultivated over larger geographical areas than crops of recent origin. Historical processes have therefore left a pervasive global legacy on the food we eat today.

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Fig. 1: Global production of food crops included in FAOSTAT.
Fig. 2: Predictors of the antiquity of cultivation.
Fig. 3: Phylogenetic structure of crop antiquity.
Fig. 4: Probability that a crop is major or minor as a function of crop antiquity and climate.
Fig. 5: Global production as a function of crop origins and crop type.
Fig. 6: Phylogenetic structure of global production.

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Data availability

All data used in this paper are publicly available at https://github.com/rubenmilla/Crop_Origins_Phylo and http://www.fao.org/faostat/en.

Code availability

The analyses carried out in this paper did not require the development of custom code. Functions were run as provided by the R packages mentioned in Methods.

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Acknowledgements

This study has been supported by grant nos. CGL2014-56567-R and CGL2017-83855-R (Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad, MINECO, Spain) and REMEDINAL TE (Comunidad de Madrid). J. María Iriondo, P. García-Palacios and M. Delgado-Baquerizo provided valuable comments to earlier versions of this work. We thank the GBIF (https://www.gbif.org/) and WordClim (https://worldclim.org/data/bioclim.html) initiatives for providing geographic and climate data.

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R.M. and C.P.O. conceived the study. R.M. analysed data and wrote a first draft of the manuscript. R.M. and C.P.O. contributed to subsequent rounds of writing and gave the approval for submission of the final version.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Rubén Milla.

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Peer review information Nature Plants thanks Robin Allaby, Itay Mayrose and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Figs. 1–5 and Tables 1–6.

Reporting Summary

Supplementary Data 1

Results of local indicators of phylogenetic association analysis (LIPA) analyses.

Supplementary Data 2

Loadings of WordClim variables on the two PCA axes shown in Supplementary Fig. 5 and used as climate-at-origin variables in the main text.

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Milla, R., Osborne, C.P. Crop origins explain variation in global agricultural relevance. Nat. Plants 7, 598–607 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41477-021-00905-1

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