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Updated: Oct 21, 2025

Quantifying Plant Soluble Protein and Digestible Carbohydrate Content, Using Corn Zea mays As an Exemplar
Published on: August 6, 2018
Global relationships between crop diversity and nutritional stability
Charlie C Nicholson1,2, Benjamin F Emery3,4, Meredith T Niles3,5,6,7
1Department of Biology, Lund University, Lund, Sweden. charlie.nicholson@biol.lu.se.
Abstract:
Nutritional stability - a food system's capacity to provide sufficient nutrients despite disturbance - is an important, yet challenging to measure outcome of diversified agriculture. Using 55 years of data across 184 countries, we assemble 22,000 bipartite crop-nutrient networks to quantify nutritional stability by simulating crop and nutrient loss in a country, and assess its relationship to crop diversity across regions, over time and between imports versus in country production. We find a positive, saturating relationship between crop diversity and nutritional stability across countries, but also show that over time nutritional stability remained stagnant or decreased in all regions except Asia. These results are attributable to diminishing returns on crop diversity, with recent gains in crop diversity among crops with fewer nutrients, or with nutrients already in a country's food system. Finally, imports are positively associated with crop diversity and nutritional stability, indicating that many countries' nutritional stability is market exposed.
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