Abstract
Unsustainable agronomic practices and environmental change necessitate a revolution in agricultural production to ensure food security. A new generation of crops that yield more with fewer inputs and are adapted to more variable environments is needed. However, major changes in breeding programmes may be required to achieve this goal. By using the genetic variation in crop yield in specific target environments that vary in soil type, soil management, nutrient inputs and environmental stresses, robust traits suited to specific conditions can be identified. It is here that long-term experimental platforms and field phenotyping have an important role to play. In this review, we will provide information about some of the field-based platforms available and the cutting edge phenotyping systems at our disposal. We will also identify gaps in our field phenotyping resources that should be filled. We will go on to review the challenges in producing crop ideotypes for the dominant management systems for which we need sustainable solutions, and we discuss the potential impact of three-way interactions between genetics, environment and management. Finally, we will discuss the role that modelling can play in allowing us to fast-track some of these processes to allow us to make rapid gains in agricultural sustainability.
Highlights
With increasing world population, diminishing resources, unsustainable agronomic practices and environmental change there is an urgent need to change agricultural production to deliver long-term food security
Achieving sustainable agricultural production requires an understanding of biogeochemical cycles, environmental fluxes, the relation between biodiversity and system function with respect to the provision of regulating services, and abiotic and biotic stresses experienced by the crop
Testing genotypes in realistic field environments is critical to achieving translation of the understanding of traits at the genetic level to sustainable production in the real world
Summary
With increasing world population, diminishing resources, unsustainable agronomic practices and environmental change there is an urgent need to change agricultural production to deliver long-term food security. A network of field-based experimental platforms that use modern agricultural practices and trial future scenarios such as reduced fertiliser rates, integrated pest management and innovative soil management techniques, is required in order to translate the research money spent on genetic and genomic understanding of crop traits into gains in sustainable crop production in the field. Many such platforms are emerging internationally, but they tend to be dominated by single discipline research in agronomy, ecology or soil science, with only a handful used to study genetic × environment (G × E). Field Based Assessment of Impacts of Management and Environment on Crop Production
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