Crop Improvement for sustainable production in a changing environment

Challenges

In Scotland, climate change is expected to increase both the average temperature and the variability in precipitation patterns. These changes will increase the frequency of both drought and waterlogging events, with disproportionate effects on susceptible crops. Changes in soil water availability will impact and interact with nutrient availabilities; reductions in nutrient inputs to minimise agricultural greenhouse gas emissions will require crops that can cope with the reduced availability of key nutrients. In addition, the changes in cloud cover bought about by changing weather patterns will impact light quality which will have a profound effect on crop quality, particularly berries. Many of these stresses have been studied in isolation, but rarely have they been considered in an integrated way.

Increasing temperatures in Scotland are likely to alleviate the limiting impact of minimum temperature for growth for many crops and when combined with elevated carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, may create an opportunity to enhance the sustainability of production. However, this will only be possible if genotypes and cropping systems can cope with the allied abiotic stresses and nutrient limitations. While agricultural intensification has successfully delivered food and fuel, it has simplified agricultural landscapes, reducing biodiversity, depleting natural resources, and threatening ecosystem services. This loss of diversity might also reduce resilience to abiotic stress, creating uncertainty about the effects of changing climate on agricultural production and environmental degradation.

There are still major gaps in our knowledge about how crops respond to environmental stress scenarios. Perennial fruit crops are grown in significant quantities in Scotland and beyond and have strategic importance because of their high value, health-related attributes, and their potential environmental benefits from being long-lived crops. It is becoming increasingly difficult for growers to schedule varieties for optimum harvest with predictable yield. We need to understand the genetic, epigenetic, and environmental drivers controlling key developmental traits that impact yield.

Questions

Solutions

This project consists of two interrelated parts that address resource use and environmental resilience.

Resource use

We focus on producing four case studies and performing experiments that look at the impacts of prevalent and combined abiotic stress on the response of key and emerging crops and the effects on resource capture. We focus on

• Light capture in blueberries
• Combined nutrient and water use in potatoes
• Resource use in legume intercropping
• Optimisation of cover crops to Scottish conditions

The first two case studies assess genotypic variation and genetic control of traits in populations of prevalent crops in Scottish agricultural systems. We are using these to understand these crops’ ability to utilise resources under stress conditions. The latter two case studies assess the impact of both genotype selection and diversification of the cropping system to combat abiotic stress and optimise resource capture with environmental change. We also link phenotype and genotype in the selection of the appropriate plants to deliver improved biodiversity, sustainability, and resilient crop systems for future climates.

Environmental resilience

We support efforts for new targets for breeding climate-resilient potatoes. Our prior work identified a novel genetic component that strongly influences both the timing of tuber initiation and tuber sprouting post-harvest. We are testing the effects of variation in tuberisation timing using controlled environment facilities and in vitro tuberisation models. Cell biology and confocal imaging approaches are deployed to determine gene function and link tuberisation signalling to developmental processes under different environmental conditions. We focus on the following:

• Phenotyping under complex stresses in soft fruit species
• Dormancy induction and release in raspberry and other fruit crops
• Genetic analysis of tuber yield under stress combinations
• Tuberisation signalling pathways and responses to abiotic stresses