RESEARCH PROJECTS
TRADITIONAL GRAIN CROP MIXTURES FOR CLIMATE RESILIENCE
Farmers in Ethiopia are already experiencing the impacts of climate change through altered drought cycles and range expansion of pests. In the northern highlands, many small-holder farmers sow traditional mixtures crops to mitigate these and other climate-related stresses, but these practices are being quickly replaced despite a lack of research on their potential benefits. Our work combines farmer interviews, agronomic field experiments, and nutrional analyses in partnership with the Periodic Table of Food Initiative to better understand this traditional strategy. We are also involved in coordinating parallel projects on traditional grain mixtures in Lebanon, Georgia, the UK, and Morocco.
THE LANGUAGE OF LAND AND LIFE: CONNECTING LANGUAGE AND ECOLOGY IN WIXÁRIKA
Due to emigration, changing lifestyles, and other factors, words for plants, ecosystems, and other elements of nature are among the most rapidly disappearing in endangered languages. This project will document the Wixárika language, also known as Huichol, an endangered Uto-Aztecan language from West-Central Mexico with a focus on ecological terms and ethnobotanical knowledge. The project is a collaboration with native-speaker language activists Gabriel Pacheco and Tutupika Carillo, Postdoctoral Fellow Dr. Stefanie Ramos Bierge, Mexican universities, and non-profit community centers. This interdisciplinary effort will provide the key tools to fill knowledge gaps in Wixárika linguistics and ethnobiology as well as a basis for Wixárika language preservation and revitalization efforts.
SHINNECOCK ETHNOBOTANY AND CLIMATE CHANGE
The Shinnecock People of Long Island, New York have maintained a connection to the plants and plant knowledge in their homelands. In collaboration with Dr. Kelsey Leonard (Waterloo University), Josephine Smith, Sunshine Gumbs, and others from the Shinnecock Nation, this project seeks to document the flora of Shinnecock territory, record traditions related to prescribed burning, document knowledge about use and management of local plants, fungi, and seaweeds, and conduct ecological restoration and educational activities to ensure that these plants and this knowledge are passed down to the next generation.
DOMESTICATION OF BRASSICA CROPS
Just as human selection has transformed wolves into a wide array of dog breeds, humans have shaped wild Brassica plants into diverse crops like kale, cauliflower, and kohlrabi from Brassica oleracea and bok choy, turnips, and napa cabbage from Brassica rapa. Despite their worldwide economic importance and potential as a model for understanding the domestication process, insights their evolutionary history have been limited due to a lack of clarity about their wild relatives. We are working to clarify the domestication history and nature of wild crop genetic resources for B. rapa and other Brassica crops in order to better understand the process of domestication and escape from domestication (feralization) as well as novel sources of diversity to protect our crops from climate change.