Mitigate and adapt agriculture to variations in climate

Research to ensure future agricultural production


An Enhanced Study of Climate Warming on Soil Organic Carbon Transformation Using Integrated Data-Model Approach

C4 Gene Manipulation and Climate Change Adaptation in Grain Amaranth via Biotechnology Breeding
 

An Enhanced Study of Climate Warming on Soil Organic Carbon Transformation Using Integrated Data-Model Approach
Dr. Jianwei Li
Humans are changing Earth's climate and global surface air temperature has increased by about 1°C since 1900, and another 2~6°C is expected at the end of this century even if anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHGs) emissions stopped immediately. This major climate warming is disruptive to human society and natural ecosystems that support human society. While accurate predictions of climate change have remained elusive. Because of the strong link between concentrations of atmospheric CO2-C and Earth's climate warming, understanding the drivers of biogeochemical transformations of soil carbon and CO2 release has become a research priority. In spite of continuously increasing volume of experimental data collections, studies however are insufficient to employ statistical and synthetic approaches to comprehensively extract useful information from a wide range of datasets. It is also extremely rare to integrate data and model and via such an integration to inform both future data collection and model projection. The state-ofthe- art technological development and supercomputing capacity enable us to synthesize and integrate data and quantitative model together in order to facilitate our exploration of the critical biogeochemical issues. This proposed study will not only conduct field and laboratory experiments but also employ quantitative modeling and data synthesis approaches to elucidate soil transformation under warmer temperature.

C4 Gene Manipulation and Climate Change Adaptation in Grain Amaranth via Biotechnology Breeding
Dr. Matthew Blair
The rapid change in climate will require the selection for photosynthetic efficiency of the crops which is a pre-requisite best utilization of the C4 photosynthesis systems. This is what we plan to achieve with amaranth in the first part of this program. We do not plan to make a large number of crosses without first screening a large number of parents because of the short/term nature of the initial project (3 years). We will use Amaranth as a pre-existing C4 photosynthesis control in the families of dicotyledonous plants to see if this species is going to be adapted to climate change stresses of drought and higher heat,  perhaps replacing other crops that will become less suitable to the climate. We plan to make three inter/specific crosses in the amaranths to test the possibility of geneflow in this genus. We have in our present collection ornamental and grain amaranths.  We will search for naturally occurring herbicide resistance in pigweed to see if we can understand the inheritance of this trait and whether it comes at a cost in terms of photosynthetic efficiency.

 





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