Anthropology

and that Earth could still be dismissed as being mostly harmless.

(I see your geekdom and raise you a book series.)

As for the OP, they're finally sending people like soil scientists and botanists in there along with the translators and they've found a long history of soil improvement and concentration of food stock plants where they shouldn't be concentrated. The patterns followed what the people needed, not western style agriculture, so they had been missed for decades. The region is turning out to be a lot more complex than any earlier observers had anticipated.