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While many plants have been used for food, a small number of staple crops including wheat, rice, and maize provide most of the food in the world today. In turn, animals provide much of the meat eaten by the human population, whether farmed or hunted, and until the arrival of mechanised transport, terrestrial mammals provided a large part of the ...
Plant defense against herbivory or host-plant resistance is a range of adaptations evolved by plants which improve their survival and reproduction by reducing the impact of herbivores. Many plants produce secondary metabolites, known as allelochemicals, that influence the behavior, growth, or survival of herbivores. These chemical defenses can ...
However, disease control is reasonably successful for most crops. Disease control is achieved by use of plants that have been bred for good resistance to many diseases, and by plant cultivation approaches such as crop rotation , pathogen-free seed, appropriate planting date and plant density, control of field moisture, and pesticide use.
GM trees under experimental development have been modified with traits intended to provide benefit to industry, foresters or consumers. Due to high regulatory and research costs, the majority of genetically modified trees in silviculture consist of plantation trees, such as eucalyptus, poplar, and pine.
Interactions between plants and their associated microorganisms in many of these microbiomes can play pivotal roles in host plant health, function, and evolution. [48] The leaf surface, or phyllosphere , harbours a microbiome comprising diverse communities of bacteria, fungi, algae, archaea, and viruses.
Ecosystem services are the various benefits that humans derive from healthy ecosystems. These ecosystems, when functioning well, offer such things as provision of food, natural pollination of crops, clean air and water, decomposition of wastes, or flood control. Ecosystem services are grouped into four broad categories of services.
Plants are capable of producing and synthesizing diverse groups of organic compounds and are divided into two major groups: primary and secondary metabolites. [9] Secondary metabolites are metabolic intermediates or products which are not essential to growth and life of the producing plants but rather required for interaction of plants with their environment and produced in response to stress.
Humans depend on plants for food, either directly or as feed for domestic animals. Agriculture deals with the production of food crops, and has played a key role in the history of world civilizations. Agriculture includes agronomy for arable crops, horticulture for vegetables and fruit, and forestry for timber. [3]