Doug Gurian-Sherman is a senior scientist in the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) Food and Environment Program. UCS is the leading science-based nonprofit working for a healthy environment and a safer world. The goal of the UCS Food and Environment Program is a food system that encourages innovative and environmentally sustainable ways to produce high-quality, safe, and affordable food, whil...

Does economic development depend on geographic endowments like temperate instead of tropical location, the ecological conditions shaping diseases, or an environment good for grains or certain cash crops? Or do these endowments of tropics, germs, and crops affect economic development only through institutions or policies? We test the endowment, institution, and policy views against each other us...

We lack both a theoretical framework and solid empirical data to understand domestication impacts on plant chemistry. We hypothesised that domestication increased leaf N and P to support high plant production rates, but biogeographic and climate patterns further influenced the magnitude and direction of changes in specific aspects of chemistry and stoichiometry. To test these hypotheses, we use...

Introduction In 2007 the Energy Independence and Security Act (EISA) established that by 2022, 36 billion gallons of biofuel are to come from renewable fuel sources. More specifically, the mandate requires the production of cellulosic biofuels to increase to 16 billion gallons ethanol equivalent annually by 2022 (Energy Independence and Security Act, 2007). Cellulosic biofuels are derived from ...

In the Andapa region of northeast Madagascar, smallholders cultivating swidden hill rice (tavy) for subsistence are pressing against neighboring nature reserves. A dominant policy approach to reducing this pressure requires that smallholders abandon tavy and purchase rice from proceeds obtained from their environmentally sustainable commercial crops, vanilla and coffee. Economic liberalization ...

Vegetables have a relatively high nitrogen requirement and at times growers apply too much fertilizer-N that contributes to ground and surface water pollution. Fertilization can be made more efficient by plant analysis. Plant tissue (petiole) nitrate testing is a way of monitoring the nitrogen condition of the crop during the growing season. This is an especially useful method as the petiole is...

Maize (Zea mays L) is one of the most versatile emerging crops having wider adaptability under varied agro-climatic conditions. Globally, maize is known as queen of cereals because it has the highest genetic yield potential among the cereals. It is cultivated on nearly 150 m ha in about 160 countries having wider diversity of soil, climate, biodiversity and management practices that contributes...

Dickeya spp. are bacterial pathogens causing soft-rot and blackleg diseases on a wide range of ornamental plants and crops. In this paper, we announce the PacBio complete genome sequences of the plant pathogens Dickeya solani RNS 08.23.3.1.A (PRI3337) and Dickeya dianthicola RNS04.9.

Given widespread declines in pollinator communities and increasing global reliance on pollinator-dependent crops, there is an acute need to develop a mechanistic understanding of native pollinator population and foraging biology. Using a population genetics approach, we determine the impact of habitat and floral resource distributions on nesting and foraging patterns of a critical native pollin...