indigenous-land-management
Indigenous land management encompasses the traditional agricultural knowledge, cultivation practices, and stewardship systems developed by native communities over generations to sustain crop diversity and soil health. For plant science, these practices offer valuable insight into the domestication history, genetic diversity, and resilience of staple root, tuber, and grain crops cultivated in diverse ecosystems. Studying these systems helps researchers understand sustainable cultivation methods and identify genetic resources that could inform crop breeding and conservation efforts.
open_in_new WikipediaPubMed · 2026-06-21
Indigenous communities in the Ecuadorian Amazon actively manage multiple related species of Xanthosoma (a taro relative) simultaneously, and these multi-species management practices — from eradication to selective keeping — may be shaping the genetic diversity of the entire plant genus, not just the one crop species scientists typically study.
Xanthosoma sagittifolium (the globally cultivated cocoyam/malanga) is no longer grown in Mondayacu despite its historical importance, suggesting localized crop abandonment within a major center of diversity.
The wild/semi-managed species lalu (Xanthosoma purpureomaculatum) is subject to trait-based selective retention — plants with large, deep-green, pest-free leaves are preferentially spared or relocated near homes, constituting an informal selection pressure on the wild population.
National herbarium and ethnobotanical synthesis confirmed broader multi-species Xanthosoma use across Ecuadorian Amazonian Indigenous groups, supporting the hypothesis that genus-level rather than single-species management is the norm in this crop complex's center of diversity.
