Agronomy in the context of Chimera (genetics)

A crop is a plant or plant product harvested for human use. Crops are cultivated at scale to produce food, fiber, fuel, and other products. Crops have been central to human civilization since the first agricultural revolution, a key stage in the broader history of agriculture, when early societies domesticated plants for food and trade. Today, a small number of staple crops such as rice, wheat, maize, and sugarcane account for the majority of global production. Because of their economic importance, crops are studied within several scientific disciplines, including agronomy, agricultural science, horticulture, and forestry.

Science in the medieval Islamic world was the science developed and practised during the Islamic Golden Age under the Abbasid Caliphate of Baghdad, the Umayyads of Córdoba, the Abbadids of Seville, the Samanids, the Ziyarids and the Buyids in Persia and beyond, spanning the period roughly between 786 and 1258. Islamic scientific achievements encompassed a wide range of subject areas, especially astronomy, mathematics, and medicine. Other subjects of scientific inquiry included alchemy and chemistry, botany and agronomy, geography and cartography, ophthalmology, pharmacology, physics, and zoology.

Medieval Islamic science had practical purposes as well as the goal of understanding. For example, astronomy was useful for determining the Qibla, the direction in which to pray, botany had practical application in agriculture, as in the works of Ibn Bassal and Ibn al-'Awwam, and geography enabled Abu Zayd al-Balkhi to make accurate maps. Islamic mathematicians such as Al-Khwarizmi, Avicenna and Jamshīd al-Kāshī made advances in algebra, trigonometry, geometry and Arabic numerals. Islamic doctors described diseases like smallpox and measles, and challenged classical Greek medical theory. Al-Biruni, Avicenna and others described the preparation of hundreds of drugs made from medicinal plants and chemical compounds. Islamic physicists such as Ibn Al-Haytham, Al-Bīrūnī and others studied optics and mechanics as well as astronomy, and criticised Aristotle's view of motion.

Horticulture (from Latin: horti + culture) is the art and science of growing fruits, vegetables, flowers, trees, shrubs and ornamental plants. Horticulture is commonly associated with the more professional and technical aspects of plant cultivation on a smaller and more controlled scale than agronomy. There are various divisions of horticulture because plants are grown for a variety of purposes. These divisions include, but are not limited to: propagation, arboriculture, landscaping, floriculture and turf maintenance. For each of these, there are various professions, aspects, tools used and associated challenges -- each requiring highly specialized skills and knowledge on the part of the horticulturist.

Typically, horticulture is characterized as the ornamental, small-scale and non-industrial cultivation of plants; horticulture is distinct from gardening by its emphasis on scientific methods, plant breeding, and technical cultivation practices, while gardening, even at a professional level, tends to focus more on the aesthetic care and maintenance of plants in gardens or landscapes. However, some aspects of horticulture are industrialized or commercial such as greenhouse production or CEA.

The Arab Agricultural Revolution was the transformation in agriculture in the Old World during the Islamic Golden Age (8th to 13th centuries). The agronomic literature of the time, with major books by Ibn Bassal and Ibn al-'Awwam, demonstrates the extensive diffusion of useful plants to medieval Spain (al-Andalus), and the growth in Islamic scientific knowledge of agriculture and horticulture. Medieval Arab historians and geographers described al-Andalus as a fertile and prosperous region with abundant water, full of fruit from trees such as the olive and pomegranate. Archaeological evidence demonstrates improvements in animal husbandry and in irrigation such as with the saqiyah waterwheel. These changes made agriculture far more productive, supporting population growth, urbanisation, and increased stratification of society.

The revolution was first described by the historian Antonio Garcia Maceira in 1876. The name was coined by the historian Andrew Watson in an influential but at the time controversial 1974 paper. However, by 2014 it had proven useful to historians, and had been supported by findings in archaeology and archaeobotany.

Ibn Bassal (Arabic: ابن بصال) was an 11th-century Andalusian Arab botanist and agronomist in Toledo and Seville, Spain who wrote about horticulture and arboriculture. He is best known for his book on agronomy, the Dīwān al-filāha (An Anthology of Husbandry).

Pedology (from Greek: πέδον, pedon, "soil"; and λόγος, logos, "study") is a discipline within soil science which focuses on understanding and characterizing soil formation, evolution, and the theoretical frameworks for modeling soil bodies, often in the context of the natural environment. Pedology is often seen as one of two main branches of soil inquiry, the other being edaphology which is traditionally more agronomically oriented and focuses on how soil properties influence plant communities (natural or cultivated).

In studying the fundamental phenomenology of soils, e.g. soil formation (aka pedogenesis), pedologists pay particular attention to observing soil morphology and the geographic distributions of soils, and the placement of soil bodies into larger temporal and spatial contexts. In so doing, pedologists develop systems of soil classification, soil maps, and theories for characterizing temporal and spatial interrelations among soils. There are a few noteworthy sub-disciplines of pedology; namely pedometrics and soil geomorphology. Pedometrics focuses on the development of techniques for quantitative characterization of soils, especially for the purposes of mapping soil properties whereas soil geomorphology studies the interrelationships between geomorphic processes and soil formation.

Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus (Medieval Greek: Κωνσταντῖνος Πορφυρογέννητος, romanized: Kōnstantīnos Porphyrogénnētos; 17 May 905 – 9 November 959) was the fourth Byzantine emperor of the Macedonian dynasty, reigning from 6 June 913 to 9 November 959. He was the son of Emperor Leo VI and his fourth wife, Zoe Karbonopsina, and the nephew of his predecessor Alexander.

Most of his reign was dominated by co-regents: from 913 until 919 he was under the regency of his mother, while from 920 until 945 he shared the throne with Romanos Lekapenos, whose daughter Helena he married, and his sons. Constantine VII is best known for the Geoponika (τά γεωπονικά), an important agronomic treatise compiled during his reign, and three, perhaps four, books; De Administrando Imperio (bearing in Greek the heading Πρὸς τὸν ἴδιον υἱὸν Ῥωμανόν), De Ceremoniis (Περὶ τῆς Βασιλείου Τάξεως), De Thematibus (Περὶ θεμάτων Άνατολῆς καὶ Δύσεως), and Vita Basilii (Βίος Βασιλείου), though his authorship of the Vita Basilii is not certain.

Landscape engineering is the application of mathematics and science to shape land and waterscapes. It can also be described as green engineering, but the design professionals best known for landscape engineering are landscape architects. Landscape engineering is the interdisciplinary application of engineering and other applied sciences to the design and creation of anthropogenic landscapes. It differs from, but embraces traditional reclamation. It includes scientific disciplines: agronomy, botany, ecology, forestry, geology, geochemistry, hydrogeology, and wildlife biology. It also draws upon applied sciences: agricultural & horticultural sciences, engineering geomorphology, landscape architecture, and mining, geotechnical, and civil, agricultural & irrigation engineering.

Landscape engineering builds on the engineering strengths of declaring goals, determining initial conditions, iteratively designing, predicting performance based on knowledge of the design, monitoring performance, and adjusting designs to meet the declared goals. It builds on the strengths and history of reclamation practice. Its distinguishing feature is the marriage of landforms, substrates, and vegetation throughout all phases of design and construction, which previously have been kept as separate disciplines.

Robert Bakewell (23 May 1725 – 1 October 1795) was an English agriculturalist, now recognized as one of the most important figures in the British Agricultural Revolution. In addition to work in agronomy, Bakewell is particularly notable as the first to implement systematic selective breeding of livestock. His advancements not only led to specific improvements in sheep, cattle and horses, but contributed to general knowledge of artificial selection.

Augustin Pyramus (or Pyrame) de Candolle (UK: /kænˈdɒl/, US: /kɒ̃ˈdɔːl/, French: [kɑ̃dɔl]; 4 February 1778 – 9 September 1841) was a Swiss botanist. René Louiche Desfontaines launched de Candolle's botanical career by recommending him at a herbarium. Within a couple of years de Candolle had established a new genus, and he went on to document hundreds of plant families and create a new natural plant classification system. Although de Candolle's main focus was botany, he also contributed to related fields such as phytogeography, agronomy, paleontology, medical botany, and economic botany.

De Candolle originated the idea of "Nature's war", which influenced Charles Darwin and the principle of natural selection. De Candolle recognized that multiple species may develop similar characteristics that did not appear in a common evolutionary ancestor; a phenomenon now known as convergent evolution. During his work with plants, de Candolle noticed that plant leaf movements follow a near-24-hour cycle in constant light, suggesting that an internal biological clock exists. Though many scientists doubted de Candolle's findings, experiments over a century later demonstrated that "the internal biological clock" indeed exists.