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DIY Agriculture

Sesame — Climate

Metadata research draftEvidence limits

⚠️ Status: metadata draft. Every DOI below is a candidate metadata record from the survey research/sesame-seeds/report.md — title and identifier only, not screened evidence. Most of these are stress-physiology experiments on contrasting genotypes, not climate-suitability ratings; the survey explicitly warns they are “stress/experimental candidates, not practical household irrigation schedules” (§3.3). No temperature, rainfall, or salinity threshold is asserted; substantive values remain Unknown until S-#### source notes exist (docs/methodology/evidence.md). Not growing advice.

What the survey holds (and does not)

Section titled “What the survey holds (and does not)”
  • The climate-related shortlist emphasizes genotype-focused stress biology: drought, waterlogging, salinity, and flowering responses in contrasting genotypes (survey §3.3). These records compare treatments/genotypes; they do not establish that “sesame tolerates drought/flood/salt” as a garden fact. Evidence: Known (scope statement); every tolerance claim itself — Evidence: Unknown.
  • Heat and climate adaptation are explicitly weak in the survey (§7); the analyzer found only six broad heat/climate hits and none supplies an accepted household threshold.

Temperature and phenology

Section titled “Temperature and phenology”
  • A 1992 candidate covers flowering response to temperature and photoperiod (10.1071/ar9921101; 31 citation edges — survey §3.2). What the response is, for which cultivars and latitudes — Evidence: Unknown until full text. See biology.md.
  • Germination-temperature candidates (10.1016/0098-8472(95)00013-x, 1995; 10.1007/s11738-017-2549-8, 2017) are establishment questions, kept in planting.md. No germination-temperature range may be quoted from either.
  • Optimal/absolute temperature ranges for growth, and frost behavior — Evidence: Unknown (all temperature fields null in data/crops/sesame.yaml).

Drought

Section titled “Drought”
  • A 2017 candidate compares drought responses of contrasting genotypes (10.1038/s41598-017-09397-6). A comparison record is not a drought-tolerance rating, and the genotypes tested may not be obtainable locally.
  • A 2022 candidate addresses drought-stress irrigation productivity (10.1016/j.agwat.2022.107569) — listed by the survey as a candidate only; its location, treatment levels, and results are unread.
  • “Drought-response literature exists” ≠ “sesame is drought-tolerant in your plot.” Household water behavior — Evidence: Unknown; see irrigation.md.

Waterlogging

Section titled “Waterlogging”
  • A 2016 candidate records waterlogging-response patterns in contrasting genotypes (10.1371/journal.pone.0149912); a 2018 candidate contrasts drought- and waterlogging-driven methylation programs (10.1016/j.plantsci.2018.09.012) — mechanism-level biology, far from drainage advice. Practical drainage requirements — Evidence: Unknown; see soil.md.

Salinity

Section titled “Salinity”
  • A 2019 candidate covers salt-stress pathways in contrasting genotypes (10.1186/s12870-019-1665-6). This is pathway-level evidence about genotypes under experimental salt stress — not a soil-salinity tolerance class for garden planning. soil.salinity_tolerant remains null in data/crops/sesame.yaml; see soil.md.

Photoperiod

Section titled “Photoperiod”
  • A photoperiod-response gene candidate (10.1186/s12870-018-1583-z, 2018) and the 1992 flowering/photoperiod record above establish that the topic is covered — not what the day-length response is. photoperiod.response in data/crops/sesame.yaml stays unknown. Sowing-date consequences — see planting.md.

Mexico and the target environment

Section titled “Mexico and the target environment”
  • One direct Mexico lead: genotype × environment interaction in sesame germplasm in Mexico (10.1002/agj2.70077, 2025), covering rainfed Guerrero environments at metadata level (survey §4). The survey asserts no agronomic outcome from it.
  • No direct regional candidate was found for climate adaptation, harvest, or household practice (survey §4); heat/climate adaptation is a named weak spot (§7). Local climate fit — Evidence: Unknown.

Corpus and screening limits

Section titled “Corpus and screening limits”
  • Climate threads sit in two survey sections — flowering/germination (§3.2) and climate/water/salinity (§3.3) — and more than 49% of canonical records lack abstracts, limiting even metadata-level screening (survey §7). Coverage statements here are therefore conservative.
  • The final rerun recorded 30 request failures (10 OpenAlex, 20 Semantic Scholar), preserved explicitly in failures.jsonl (survey §7) — climate-relevant records may exist beyond the retrieved set.

Small-scale relevance

Section titled “Small-scale relevance”
  • A household grower needs three practical answers this page cannot give: the local sowing window, the frost/heat boundaries of the site, and the water regime the plot can supply. All three — Evidence: Unknown for the intended region.
  • Genotype-dependent stress results mean a neighbor’s experience with one cultivar cannot be generalized to another. Record cultivar with every observation.

Unknowns and experiments

Section titled “Unknowns and experiments”
  • Temperature and photoperiod response of any locally obtainable cultivar — Evidence: Unknown (open questions 1 and 3).
  • Heat tolerance — Evidence: Unknown; sparse metadata coverage supplies no accepted threshold (survey §7).
  • Site-level climate fit in Mexico beyond the Guerrero G×E lead — Evidence: Unknown; Evidence: Needs experiment for any local planting (E1 records emergence and branching under real conditions).
Section titled “Related pages”
  • biology.md — flowering and photoperiod genetics.
  • planting.md — germination temperature and sowing-date candidates.
  • irrigation.md — water stress and irrigation-level candidates.
  • soil.md — salinity and waterlogging in a soil context.
  • index.md — crop overview.

Provenance

Section titled “Provenance”