Crop adaptation to climate change:An evolutionary perspective

The disciplines of evolutionary biology and plant and animal breeding have been intertwined throughout their development,with responses to artificial selection yielding insights into the action of natural selection and evolutionary biology providing statistical and conceptual guidance for modern breeding.Here we offer an evolutionary perspective on a grand challenge of the 21st century:feeding humanity in the face of climate change.We first highlight promising strategies currently under way to adapt crops to current and future climate change.These include methods to match crop varieties with current and predicted environments and to optimize breeding goals,management practices,and crop microbiomes to enhance yield and sustainable production.We also describe the promise of crop wild relatives and recent technological innovations such as speed breeding,genomic selection,and genome editing for improving environmental resilience of existing crop varieties or for developing new crops.Next,we discuss how methods and theory from evolutionary biology can enhance these existing strategies and suggest novel approaches.We focus initially on methods for reconstructing the evolutionary history of crops and their pests and symbionts,because such historical information provides an overall framework for crop-improvement efforts.We then describe how evolutionary approaches can be used to detect and mitigate the accumulation of deleterious mutations in crop genomes,identify alleles and mutations that underlie adaptation(and maladaptation)to agricultural environments,mitigate evolutionary trade-offs,and improve critical proteins.Continuing feedback between the evolution and crop biology communities will ensure optimal design of strategies for adapting crops to climate change.

Impacts of climate change on water quantity, water salinity, food security, and socioeconomy in Egypt

Climate change might have direct impacts on water quantity in Egypt and lead to indirect effects on Mediterranean saltwater intrusion to groundwater,which exposes agriculture to vulnerability.This study investigated impacts of climate change on agriculture,with particular regard to food security and socioeconomy,and quantified the effectiveness of cropping pattern adaptation measures by integrating three mathematical models.The BlueM model was used for hydrological simulations of Nasser Lake under flooding scenarios to predict the water supply from the High Aswan Dam.The water and salinity balance(WB-SAL)model was adopted to estimate the water salinity in the Nile Delta.The simulated results from the BlueM and WB-SAL models were integrated with the agricultural simulation model for Egypt(ASME)to project cropping patterns,food security,and socioeconomy throughout the country.The results showed that future climate change will directly affect the total crop area;crop areas for 13 crop types;the self-sufficiency of wheat,rice,cereal,and maize supplies;and socioeconomic indicators.The proposed cropping pattern adaptation measures focus on fixing the crop areas of rice and orchards and providing half of the population with lentils,maize,onion,vegetables,milk,and meat.The adaptation measures have the potential to promote food security without causing deterioration of the socioeconomic situation.However,water availability has much more significant effects on food security and socioeconomy than cropping pattern adaptation measures do.Accordingly,the country should rationalize water use efficiency and increase water supply.©2021 Hohai University.Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V.This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).