All articles tagged with #maize
NASA’s Earth Observatory uses a NISAR radar-derived false-color composite from 10 passes during the 2025–2026 growing season to visualize crop types and changes in South Africa’s Maize Triangle. Green marks vegetation, red shows unvegetated surfaces, and blue indicates how rapidly vegetation changed, offering a compact, per-pixel view of irrigation effects and land-use shifts over a large agricultural area.
Maize plants in crowded fields release a volatile gas called linalool that triggers defensive responses in neighboring plants, enhancing pest resistance but reducing growth; this natural mechanism could be harnessed to develop more resilient crops and reduce pesticide use.
A study by Brazilian scientists suggests that the domestication of maize may have been completed in South America, based on ancient maize samples found in Peruaçu Valley, Brazil. These samples, which are the farthest from maize's origin in Mexico, show traits of semi-domestication and are dated between 1,010 and 500 years ago. The research highlights the role of Indigenous communities in the development of maize varieties and has implications for genetic resource conservation and property rights.