Project
Breeding for rice varieties under aerobic conditions
With limited freshwater resources worldwide, we need to start growing rice that can be productive with less irrigation and without paddy conditions. This project aims to develop varieties and highlight traits that enable this in India growing systems.
Introduction
With changing climate and increased worldwide populations, there is increased pressure to improve agricultural productivity without using more resources, especially land and water resources.
To maximize our usage of current available freshwater and land, especially in agricultural systems such as Indian systems that will be hardest hit by climate change, we need to breed for varieties that can withstand reduced irrigation.
Hence, this project is developed to ultimately find traits that can be bred for or even breed for varieties that successfully grow and provide yield under limited irrigation in aerobic rice systems.
The project aims to use a combination of field trials, modelling and genomic selection techniques in order to achieve the project goals. Another part of the project will research the dissemination of these research goals to stakeholders and study the social aspects of challenges in improving in agriculture, but this last part does not involve WUR.
Project description
In the WUR-CSA node of the project, we will aim to combine data from field trials and smaller physiological experiments into a modelling framework to find which traits promote the key crop trait “water use efficiency” (WUE). Most importantly, a key goal of this part of the project to highlight combination of traits that enable high WUE without sacrificing productivity, whether photosynthetic or scaled up.
Specifically, field trials in India in collaboration with University of Agricultural Sciences Bangalore will provide data on varieties growth rate, yield performance and architecture as well as leaf temperature. This data will be inputted into mechanistic and statistical modelling frameworks that will scale the possible effect of these traits to different environments.
These trials will be combined with detailed physiological experiments studying key aerobic and anaerobic varieties in Wageningen that illuminate the trade-offs within key physiological processes and enable us to refine our screening targets in larger field trials.