Phenotyping complex traits of drought and heat tolerance for future climate-resilient German wheat

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Urs Schmidhalter
• Subject Area: Plant Cultivation, Plant Nutrition, Agricultural Technology ; Plant Breeding and Plant Pathology
• Term: from 2018 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 403833702

Climate change in Central Europe is expected to influence crop growth conditions through frequent drought and heat extremes. Wheat is particularly sensitive to heat and drought during the reproductive stages. An increasingly challenging crop environment and the rapid advances in genetic technologies both call for a better understanding of the physiological processes and their interaction with the environment through high-throughput phenotyping technologies that permit the evaluation of complex trait expression on a breeding scale in realistic environments. Therefore, our hypothesis is that to develop strategies for climate resilience improvement of German wheat, a comprehensive field evaluation in drier and warmer field conditions is needed in order to provide reliable traits of drought and heat tolerance using high-throughput phenotyping of traits and exploiting new genetic resources from wheat cultivars already adapted to drought/heat. The ultimate objective is to identify novel and complex traits of drought/heat tolerance for winter wheat with a representative panel of German cultivars and a diversified set of wheat from Eastern Europe using high throughput phenotyping technologies. Specific objectives of this project are: i) to assess the adaptation of German wheat to drought/heat stress under Moldovan field conditions for a better understanding of the complex network of drought/heat-related traits by also dissecting the impact of drought and heat using rainfed/irrigated conditions and the role of roots in order to provide reliable traits of drought/heat tolerance; ii) to further exploit new sources of drought/heat tolerance of East-European cultivars with natural genetic diversity, which is of utmost importance to adopt German wheat to the anticipated future climate change, iii) to develop techniques and algorithms for high-throughput phenotyping the complex traits of drought/heat tolerance for wheat using both terrestrial and aerial spectral/thermal/digital imagery techniques; iv) to combine information from previous and on-going experimentation in Moldova and Germany to identify relevant traits of drought and heat tolerance of German and East European wheat reflecting multiple site-year information. Significance: i) Assessing the performance of existing German wheat varieties in future growing conditions of climate change and identifying traits for adaptation to drought and heat will contribute to develop strategies for climate resilience; ii) Innovative approaches for phenotyping the tolerance of drought and heat will form the basis of a targeted and applied research grounding and iii) Identifying genetic variation for the traits of drought/heat tolerance from existing East European wheat cultivars already adapted, thus new genetic resources can be introduced in breeding programs.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants