DDRIG: Biodiversity, Adaptability, and Breeding Resilient Food Systems

This research examines the impacts of characteristic weather patterns on crop breeding and biodiversity conservation. It focuses on how plant breeders, seed savers, and farmers use, maintain, and create crop biodiversity. In addition, this research emphasizes how both plants and people attempt to adapt to new environments and transform existing systems. The PI studies seeds as inextricably and simultaneously biological, past and future oriented, and rooted and mobile. The PI uses a mixed-method approach that includes participant observation, in-depth interviews, and process tracing. The participant observation portion of the research includes embedding the PI in plant breeding projects, growing and saving seeds with farmers, and working with germplasm banks. This project contributes to our understanding of how agrarian and scientific structures and practices are transformed, used, or abandoned. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.