Functional phenomics for improved climate resilience in Nordic agriculture

Abstract

The five Nordic countries span the most northern region for field cultivation in the world. This presents challenges per se with short growing seasons, long days and a need for frost tolerance. Climate change has additionally increased risks for micro-droughts and water logging as well as pathogens and pests expanding northwards. Thus, Nordic agriculture demands crops that are adapted to the special Nordic growth conditions and future climate scenarios. A focus on crop varieties and traits important to Nordic agriculture, including the unique resource of nutritious wild crops, can meet these needs. In fact, with a future longer growing season due to climate change the region could contribute proportionally more to the global agricultural production. This also applies to other northern regions, including the Arctic. To address current growth conditions, mitigate impacts of climate change and meet market demands, the adaptive capacity of crops that both perform well in northern latitudes and are more climate resilient has to be increased, and better crop management systems be built. This requires functional phenomics approaches that integrate versatile high-throughput phenotyping, physiology and bioinformatics. This review stresses key target traits, the opportunities of latitudinal studies and infrastructure needs for phenotyping to support Nordic agriculture.

Differentiated responses of the phyllosphere bacterial community of the yellowhorn tree to precipitation and temperature regimes across Northern China

“…To clarify this, we will select and set more sampling sites in each of the four sampling site regions (Yinchuan, Otogqianqi, Tongliao and Zhangwu) across north China based on their climate data to build the gradients of temperature and precipitation of each sampling site region or establish gradients of temperature and humidity in the controlled conditions of greenhouse or laboratory to better interpretate the correlation between the yellowhorn phyllosphere bacterial communities and climatic variables in our future work. Furthermore, the reductionist synthetic community (RSC) method based on microbial cultivation (Niu et al, 2017;Niu et al, 2020;Wu et al, 2023), together with the plant phenomics technology approach (Roitsch et al, 2022;Zavafer et al, 2023), may be employed to validate the opposite responses to rainfall and temperature.…”

Plant microphenotype: from innovative imaging to computational analysis

“…From an agricultural perspective, biophysical and biochemical processes underlying water and carbon cycling, such as photosynthesis, mass flow, partitioning, and their response to environmental factors, are closely related to breeding target traits towards high‐yield, high‐quality, resilient, and resource‐efficient crops. These favourable traits are mainly determined by the sum of physiological processes that are expressed in microphenotypes, necessitating the upscaling of the effects of these microphenotypes to the individual and canopy levels (Roitsch et al ., 2022 ; Salon et al ., 2017 ; Zhang, Wang, et al ., 2021 ). However, these processes mainly occur at the cell and tissue levels and cannot be investigated through macroscopic phenotyping methods (Clark et al ., 2020 ; Hall et al ., 2016 ).…”

Climate Change—The Rise of Climate-Resilient Crops

“…Climate change has far-reaching consequences for agriculture. It alters the distribution of crops and the suitability of growing areas and leads to shifts in plant phenology [ 8 , 9 ]. Higher temperatures and increased surface CO 2 levels can enhance crop yields in certain locations, contingent upon meeting other requirements such as nutrient levels, soil moisture, and water availability.…”