My keynote at the Applied Evolution Summit on Heron Island — scroll down to 2010 for video — explored evolutionary tradeoffs as opportunities… 
…like reducing solar tracking, which shades neighbors, but also lower leaves… 
…and therefore decreases photosynthesis in high-LAI alfalfa (Denison et al., 2010). 
Could giving up teenage pregnancy increase longevity (Denison, 2011)? 
But most of my research has focused on increasing symbiont benefits to crops. 
Recently, I’ve developed methods to measure nitrogen fixation for as little as $300. 
We are measuring hydrogen (H2), a proxy for nitrogen fixation. 
H2 predicts soybean yield, except with rhizobia that recycle H2 (upper left). 
2025 MacArthur “Genius” Toby Kiers, now a professor in Amsterdam, was my first PhD student. 
She recruited Stuart West, now at Oxford, for research with us at UC Davis… 
…predicting a tragedy- of-the-commons collapse of N fixation (West et al., 2002)…. 
…avoided by legume “sanctions” against nonfixing nodules (lower)… 
…shown by Kiers and by Ryoko Oono , now a professor at UC Santa Barbara. 
Kiers found soybeans may tolerate mediocre (50%) N fixation (KIers et al., 2006). 
Oono found manipulation of rhizobia by legumes evolved 5 times (Oono et al., 2010 )… 
…and increases N-per-CO2 efficiency (Oono & Denison, 2010). 
Will Ratfcliff is now a professor at Georgia Tech. 
Ratcliff found bet-hedging dormancy and lipid PHB hoarding in rhizobia (Ratcliff & Denison, 2010). 
Katherine Muller analyzes complex datasets for USDA. 
Muller showed PHB-hoarding “cheaters” survive longer in soil (Muller & Denison, 2024). 
My book on these ideas came out as Canadians protested cuts to environmental research. 
The US Constitution says spending is set by Congress, not the President.
Click the 3-bar symbol at upper right for latest posts. Scroll down for videos.
This blog has focused on topics from my book, Darwinian Agriculture, but I plan to broaden it to include other aspects of evolutionary biology that particularly interest me: cool adaptations of wild species, applications of evolutionary biology to agriculture and health, and (tying the two together) evolutionary tradeoffs that constrained past evolution, but left “low-handing fruit”: fairly simple opportunities for us to improve agriculture or health. So I’m tentatively retitling the blog, but keeping the darwinianagriculture.com address for now.
About me
- B.A. (ecology), Evergreen State College, 1976.
- M.S. and Ph.D. (crop science), Cornell University, 1980 and 1983.
- Advisors: crop physiologist Thomas Sinclair, soil microbiologist Martin Alexander, ecologist Brian Chabot, agricultural engineer Norman Scott.
- Postdocs with Robert Loomis (UC Davis) and Park Nobel (UCLA), 1983-1986.
- Research Plant Physiologist with USDA, 1986-1993.
- Associate and full Professor, Agronomy and Range Science, UC Davis, 1993-2005.
- Adjunct Professor, Ecology and Evolution, University of Minnesota, 2005-
- My publications (Google Scholar page)
- Amazon author page with brief biography.
Past talks, some with links to videos
- 2024 April 11. Should crop plants specialize as well as cooperate? Lanzhou, China. 1st Symposium on Crop Evolutionary Ecology
- 2022 January 31. Small-scale projects could make crop plants and their symbionts more cooperative. Economy of Francesco, Rome, Italy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pk5RlXPVfzo
- 2022. Is it important for agronomists to publish in high-profile journals? Invited panelist at national meeting of American Society of Agronomy, Baltimore.
- 2021 September 22. Individual-versus-community tradeoffs in legume-rhizobia symbiosis. University of Minnesota; Ecology, Evolution and Behavior seminar series.
- 2021 September 17. Host-imposed sanctions in rhizobium-legume symbiosis (remote). Argentine Congress of Environmental and Agricultural Microbiology.
- 2021 May 31. Implications of past evolution for plant breeding and deploying crop diversity. University of Hohenheim, Rethinking Agriculture series.
- 2021 April 12. Using artificial intelligence in research to improve nitrogen fixation by crops. Technical University of Denmark. Recorded invited 8-minute talk.
- 2020 November 8-11. Nature’s wisdom? Implications of evolutionary tradeoffs for perennial grains. American Society of Agronomy (virtual meeting).
- 2020 November 8-11. Don’t mind the (yield) gap! American Society of Agronomy (virtual meeting).
- 2020 October 9. Cooperation and conflict in legume-rhizobia symbiosis, with implications for improving agriculture. University of Kentucky (via Zoom).
- 2020 March 3. Breeding to enhance nitrogen fixation and other benefits from rhizobia. Soybean breeders workshop. Saint Louis.
- 2019 December 10. An evolutionary perspective on environmental cues, signals, and manipulation in plant-microbe interactions. University of Helsinki, Finland (via internet).
- 2019 June 3-7. Darwinian agriculture: where does Nature’s wisdom lie?” Keynote lecture at Harlan International Symposium on the Origins of Agriculture and Domestication, Montpelier, France.
- 2019 June 13-19. Domestication versus “taming” of crop plants and their symbionts. Klosterneuburg, Austria. Workshop on “Convergent Evolution of Agriculture in Insects and Humans.“
- 2018 November 26-29. Adelaide, Australia. Workshop on “Making Science Useful for Agriculture.”
- 2017 October 11. What should agriculture copy from nature? (In Spanish) Agricultural technology congress CREAtech, Cordoba, Argentina.
- 2017 August 20-25. European Society for Evolutionary Biology, Groningen, the Netherlands: Domestication versus ‘taming’ of crops and symbionts
- 2017 June 26. Talk by Ph.D. student, Katherine Muller at Evolution meetings in Portland, Oregon:
- 2017 May 11: University of Minnesota: Improving cooperation among plants and microbes
- 2017 May 8: Wageningen University (Netherlands): Improving cooperation among plants and microbes
- 2017 May 5-7 Mantova Food and Science Festival (Mantua, Italy).
Darwin, Drought, and Disease
(in English, but introduced in Italian) - 2017 February 27: Penn State.: Evolutionary tradeoffs as opportunities
- 2016 November 17: University of Agriculture Faisalabad, Pakistan:
Long-term experiments in a world with a short attention span - 2016 November 7: Crop Science Society of America annual meeting (Phoenix): What can we learn from evolutionary biology and natural ecosystems to improve stress responses?
- 2016 October: University of California, Davis:
- Oct. 26 @ 12:10: The future of nitrogen-fixing crops
- Oct. 27 @ 10:30: Microbe-plant-human cooperation in agriculture
- 2016 October 3: Monmouth College (Monmouth, Illinois).
- 4:00: What Can Short-Term Experiments Tell Us about Long-Term Agricultural Sustainability?
- 7:30: McMullen Lecture: Hardin’s Garden: Untapped Potential for Plant-Microbe-Human Cooperation in Agriculture.
- 2016 September 26. University of Maine, Orono.
- Microbe-plant-human cooperation in agriculture.
- 2015: Dublin, Ireland.
- 2013: UC Davis.
- 2013: International Rice Research Institute.
- Ten-minute interview.
- 5-part lecture series. Each lecture is followed by stimulating discussion.
- 2010: Applied-Evolution Summit, Heron Island, Australia.
darwinianagriculture.com 
Hey, professor, I know your blog from the book “why evolution is true”, at the end of this book it introduce a lot of net resource including your blog: http://blog.lib.umn.edu/denis036/thisweekinevolution/
It’s a pity that “The University of Minnesota is ending their Uthink blog platform”.
I leave this comment to ask if you could backup all the content of your previous blog here? So that we can read them again.
Thanks for your attention.
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Based on your interest, I will plan to repost some favorite material from my former blog. I need to remove commenter emails, etc., so can’t just upload everything.
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