Climate change will alter the growing conditions for wheat in many areas of the world. Scientists are now investigating wheat varieties that are able to tolerate projected changing growing conditions.
Climate change is approaching – in fact, it is already upon us. Within the last ten years many parts of Europe have experienced an increase in the frequency of extreme drought and heat events in the summer. This has led to significant reductions in agricultural yields, which clearly shows how important it is to develop crops that can cope with heat, water shortages and variable weather conditions.
Scientists from the Faculty of Agricultural Sciences at Aarhus University are now joining forces with colleagues from the University of Copenhagen to investigate if new winter wheat varieties can be found that can cope better with heat and drought stress.
Another project aim is to promote the use of advanced physiological and biotechnological measuring methods that can determine at an early stage whether a variety is worth pursuing or not..
- In this way we can utilise the strength of the biotechnological methods for both organic and conventional productions without the direct use of GMO, says the project leader, senior scientist Bernd Wollenweber, from the Department of Genetics and Biotechnology at the Faculty of Agricultural Sciences.
Wanted: stress-tolerant wheat
Wheat accounts for about 30 percent of the world’s cereal production and is therefore a very important crop. Both heat and drought can affect the yield at many different growth stages.
By examining the processes that regulate the plant’s ability to adapt to heat and drought stress, scientists can identify the mechanisms that are important for the ability of the wheat plant to maintain a high and stable yield under variable climatic conditions. The scientists will, among other things, study the ability of the crop to regulate its water-use and how it uses light and CO2 carbon in photosynthesis.
One of the first steps in the project is to find wheat plants that cope well with high temperatures. Scientists are using the winter months to screen a range of wheat varieties in the laboratory. The most suitable varieties will be grown in field trials in the summer to test the implications for both yield and quality. The successful types from this trial will then be crossbred and the experiment repeated, but this time to test heat tolerance in addition to drought tolerance.
There is a complex relationship between climate variations, plant reactions, effects on quality and yield and the development and applicability of various methods. Cooperation of different scientific disciplines is therefore necessary. This is why plant physiologists, geneticists and modellers from several departments at the Faculty of Agricultural Sciences and from KU-Life are taking part in the project.
In addition to achieving a better understanding of the effect of several stress factors on growth, yield and quality of wheat and the genetic background for drought and heat tolerance, the scientists expect to develop methods for screening for drought and heat tolerance and to develop models that estimate how effective these qualities are under different climate change scenarios.
- We may ultimately end up with a range of results from this work: new rapid measuring techniques for the identification of suitable plants, knowledge of which genes are important in practice, and with the help of mathematical models we will get an estimate of the effect on production and the environment, says Carl-Otto Ottesen from the Department of Horticulture at the Faculty of Agricultural Sciences.
The project receives support from the Ministry of Food, Agriculture and Fisheries.
