John Tuxill, who received a Ph.D. from F&ES last December, has been awarded Yale’s prestigious John Addison Porter Prize for his dissertation, “Agrarian Change and Crop Diversity in Mayan Milpas of Yucatan, Mexico: Implications for In Situ Conservation.”

Tuxill’s dissertation is an analysis of the agricultural diversity of Mayans in the Yucatan region of Mexico. His study suggests that intergenerational changes in the ideology of agricultural production, combined with declines in traditional ecological knowledge, pose the greatest challenge for the on-farm conservation of agrodiversity in smallholder agricultural landscapes, like Yucatan, as well as for the sustainability of rural societies themselves.

“John’s dissertation is simply the best cultural and historical, as well as ecological and economic, in-depth analysis of agrodiversity that I know of,” said Michael Dove, Tuxill’s advisor and Margaret K. Musser Professor of Social Ecology. “John’s research, by locating the source of crop diversity in the wider social fabric, transcends current thinking and offers a powerful new model for thinking about biogenetic conservation.”

The John Addison Porter Prize is given for a written work of scholarship in any field in which it is possible, through original effort, to gather and relate facts and/or principles and to make the product of general human interest. The award was established in 1872 by the Kingsley Trust Association (The Scroll and Key Society) in honor of the late Professor Porter, who received a bachelor’s degree from Yale in 1842.