Climbreed

Wheat provides 20% of calories and protein to more than 3.5 billion people in 95 countries. Improving wheat yields is an important measure to avoid further expansion of crop land into natural vegetation and to secure global food security. In the past 20 years wheat yields were stagnating in Switzerland (1), France and several other European countries (2) with yields above 6 t ha-1. Climate change and the changes in agricultural practices are the major drivers of the stagnation (2). In the same period, global per-capita cropland area decreased by 10% due to population growth while the total cropland area increased by 9% (3).
The major climatic factors reducing wheat yield in Europe were heat events during grain filling and drought during the stem elongation phase (2). But also extreme events, like high temperatures in autumn combined with low radiation and high rainfall in spring were identified as factors in particular years. Thus, the general change to higher temperatures, a higher evaporative demand, and the related higher risks of drought together with the erratic occurrence of extreme events are threatening global wheat yields. Importantly, there is still constant genetic improvement meaning that without breeding interventions, yield would have declined in the past 30 years. But breeders require new tools to increase their selection efficiency by factoring in the effect of abiotic stress on yield.
 

ClimBreed aims to develop new, image-based phenotyping methods to deliver such tools. The project is part of the early-generation variety testing network of Agroscope and DSP. It aims to tightly link the development of physiological breeding methods with practical breeding. Thereby we evaluate two options: i) direct phenomic selection in the breeding nursery and ii) intense phenotyping training populations for physiological traits to develop genomic prediction models incorporating environmental-response models. To achieve this, ClimBreed utilizes dense and continuous phenotyping with the new 13 Kamera sensor rig of the FIP and a commercially available dual camera system (Literal) to observe more than 300 wheat genotypes throughout the growing season.

1. Herrera JM, Levy Häner L, Mascher F, Hiltbrunner J, Fossati D, Brabant C, et al. Lessons From 20 Years of Studies of Wheat Genotypes in Multiple Environments and Under Contrasting Production Systems. Front Plant Sci [Internet]. 2020 [cited 2020 Jan 29];10. Doi: 10.3389/fpls.2019.01745
2. Le Gouis J, Oury FX, Charmet G. How changes in climate and agricultural practices influenced wheat production in Western Europe. Journal of Cereal Science. 2020 May 1;93:102960.
3. Potapov P, Turubanova S, Hansen MC, Tyukavina A, Zalles V, Khan A, et al. Global maps of cropland extent and change show accelerated cropland expansion in the twenty-first century. Nat Food. 2022 Jan;3(1):19–28.