Where do our crops come from?
Of the roughly 350,000 known plant species, fewer than 900 are cultivated for food worldwide. This explorer turns Prof. Rubén Milla's Crop Origins & Phylo Food database into an interactive page letting you trace each crop back to the wild progenitor's biogeographic realm, plot its climate envelope, and follow its taxonomic and evolutionary lineage.
The interface is split in two: a Global Explorer covering all 867 crops, and a separate Domestication Antiquity A section for the 211 species for which a published domestication date exists. The two sets of filters are independent moving the antiquity sliders does not constrain the rest of the explorer, and vice versa.
Scroll to navigate, or use the rail on the left to jump between sections. Press / at any time to focus search, Esc to close any open panel.
Where wild progenitors are most abundant
Each crop is plotted at the centroid of the ecoregion (Olson et al. 2001) where its wild progenitor has the most GBIF occurrence records. Marker colour encodes biogeographic realm; the soft gradient communicates that the location is an indicator of origin region, not the precise domestication site.
Crops along the timeline
Every dot is a crop placed by its earliest published domestication date, grouped by biogeographic realm. The horizontal scale runs right-to-left: Today on the right, the dawn of agriculture on the left.
Order → Family → Species
A taxonomic dendrogram of the filtered crop set. Click any species (orange leaf) for the full record wild progenitor, climate envelope, domestication and cultivation antiquity, GBIF coverage.
Mean annual temperature × precipitation
A Whittaker-style plot of each crop's wild-progenitor median climate. X-axis: BIO1 (mean annual temperature, °C), Y-axis: BIO12 (annual precipitation, mm). Dots are coloured by realm. Hover any point for species and ecoregion; click to open the full record.
What's in the filtered subset?
Live charts that update with whatever family / use / realm / growth-form filters you've applied above.
The 211 dated crops
Of the 867 species in the database, only 211 carry a published estimate for minimum_time_domestication. From here on, every visualization is restricted to that subset and uses an independent set of filters (the orange block in the sidebar) so anything you set here will not affect the Global Explorer above.
Where the dated crops were domesticated
Same geographic logic as the Global Atlas, but restricted to the 211-species subset. Markers are coloured by age class rather than realm to make the deep-time pattern visible at a glance. Hover for details, click for the full record.
Holocene pattern of domestication
A horizontal dot plot where each species appears at its domestication year. Density shows how many domestication events occurred in each region over time.
The earliest and latest domesticated crops
Side-by-side ranking of the 20 oldest and 20 most recently domesticated crops in the filtered subset. Click any row for the full record.