The evolution of problematic plants, both weeds and invasives, is a topic of increasing interest. Plants that have evolved from domesticated ancestors have certain advantages for study. Because of their economic importance, domesticated plants are generally well-characterized and readily available for ecogenetic comparison with their wild descendants. Thus, the evolutionary history of crop descendants has the potential to be reconstructed in some detail. Furthermore, growing crop progenitors with their problematic descendants in a common environment allows for the identification of significant evolutionary differences that correlate with weediness or invasiveness. We sought well-established examples of invasives and weeds for which genetic and/or ethnobotanical evidence has confirmed their evolution from domesticates. We found surprisingly few cases, only 13. We examine our list for generalizations and then some selected cases to reveal how plant pests have evolved from domesticates. Despite their potential utility, crop descendants remain underexploited for evolutionary study. Promising evolutionary research opportunities for these systems are abundant and worthy of pursuit.

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Summary1. In general, conservation seeks to prevent further habitat loss but in many cases there is a need to reverse habitat degradation. Restoration of habitat is necessary to achieve biodiversity conservation goals but often it is a costly and time-intensive process. Prioritization of where and when habitat is restored can help to ensure the cost-effective delivery of desired outcomes. 2. We develop a restoration prioritization decision support tool to identify the combination of restoration sites and the schedule for their implementation most likely to deliver the greatest utility for a fixed budget and operational constraints. We use a case study to apply our prioritization approach in order to illustrate the data that can be employed to parameterise the analysis and the outputs that are able to inform restoration planning. We compare restoration schedules under alternative utility functions to demonstrate trade-offs associated with different objectives, assumptions and preferences for particular outcomes. 3. Our prioritization approach is spatially and temporally explicit and accounts for the costs and benefits of restoration, the likelihood of restoration success, the probability of stochastic events, feedbacks, time lags and spatial connectivity. 4. Through collaboration with restoration practitioners we derive quantitative and spatially explicit data on each site requiring restoration. We determine the relative priority for restoring each site and develop a restoration schedule over 20 years. 5. Our results showed that after 20 years a little over a half of the sites requiring restoration are likely be successfully restored, while the total expenditure at our site will be c. US$13AE7 millionalmost the entire budget of $14 million. 6. Synthesis and applications. Our restoration prioritization approach provides a schedule for where and when restoration should occur, and also provides operational guidance and support for cost-effective restoration planning such as informing the likely total cost of restoration.

The domestication and improvement of crop plants have long fascinated evolutionary biologists, geneticists, and anthropologists. In recent years, the development of increasingly powerful molecular and statistical tools has reinvigorated this now fast-paced field of research. In this paper, we provide an overview of how such tools have been applied to the study of crop evolution. We also highlight lessons that have been learned in light of a few long-standing and interrelated hypotheses concerning the origins of crop plants and the nature of the genetic changes underlying their evolution. We conclude by discussing compelling evolutionary genomic approaches that make possible the efficient and unbiased identification of genes controlling crop-related traits and provide further insight into the actual timing of selection on particular genomic regions.

Summary• Introgression of cultivar alleles into wild plant populations via crop-wild hybridization is primarily governed by their fitness effects as well as those of linked loci. The fitness of crop-wild hybrids is often dependent on environmental factors, but less is understood about how aspects of the environment affect individual cultivar alleles.• This study investigated the effects of naturally occurring herbivory on patterns of phenotypic selection and the genetic architecture of plant-herbivore interactions in an experimental sunflower crop-wild hybrid population in two locales.• Phenotypic selection analyses suggested that cultivar alleles conferring increased size were generally favored, but at one site cultivar-like flowering time was favored only if three types of herbivory were included in the selection model. Quantitative trait locus (QTL) mapping identified three regions in which the cultivar allele conferred a selective advantage for a number of co-localized traits. Quantitative trait loci for several measures of insect herbivory were detected and, although the cultivar allele increased herbivory damage at the majority of these QTLs, they rarely colocalized with advantageous cultivar alleles for morphological traits.• These results suggest that a subset of cultivar traits/alleles are advantageous in natural environments but that herbivory may mitigate the selective advantage of some cultivar alleles.