title: Plant domestication through an ecological lens.
abstract: Our understanding of domestication comes largely from archeology and genetics. Here, we advocate using current ecological theory and methodologies to provide novel insights into the causes and limitations of evolution under cultivation, as well as into the wider ecological impacts of domestication. We discuss the importance of natural selection under cultivation, that is, the forces promoting differences in Darwinian fitness between plants in crop populations and of constraints, that is, limitations of diverse nature that, given values for trait X, shorten the range of variation of trait Y, during the domestication process. Throughout this opinion paper, we highlight how ecology can yield insight into the effects of domestication on plant traits, on crop feedback over ecological processes, and on how species interactions develop in croplands.
authors.affiliation: Departamento de Biología y Geología, Área de Biodiversidad y Conservación, Escuela Superior de Ciencias Experimentales y Tecnología, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, c/Tulipán s/n, Móstoles 28933, Spain. Electronic address: ruben.milla@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Rubén
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Milla
authors.affiliation: Department of Animal and Plant Sciences, University of Sheffield, Sheffield S10 2TN, UK.
authors.forename: Colin P
authors.initials: CP
authors.lastname: Osborne
authors.affiliation: Institute of Integrative Biology, ETH Zürich, Universitätstrasse 16, Zürich, 8092, Switzerland.
authors.forename: Martin M
authors.initials: MM
authors.lastname: Turcotte
authors.affiliation: Centre d'Ecologie Fonctionnelle et Evolutive, Montpellier 5, France.
authors.forename: Cyrille
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Violle
mesh_terms: D005075:Biological Evolution; D018556:Crops, Agricultural / Q000235:genetics*; D055669:Ecological and Environmental Phenomena; D056084:Genetic Fitness; D010641:Phenotype; D012641:Selection, Genetic
keywords: constraints; cultivation; domestication; ecology; natural selection; phenotype