Applied Mathematics and Omics to Assess Crop Genetic Resources for Climate Change Adaptive Traits PDF

Preface

We are at the cusp of global climate change, and the increasing frequency of annual droughts has had signicant negative impacts on agricultural production, especially in the drylands. Although seeking higher yield has always been the focus of breeders, there is an urgent need to identify crop cultivars with tolerance to biotic and abiotic stresses for adaptation of crops to the changing climate. Climate change is bound to present new pests and disease challenges for which we urgently need new sources of genetic variation to sustain agriculture.

Crop improvement or modications to meet the challenges of mitigating the effects of climate change will largely depend on availability of genes for each crop that can address the vagaries of the changing environments. However, nding the required alleles that breeders are seeking is a daunting task, and it has been subject to minimal research mainly due to the requirement of signicant manpower and many years of time. We are pressed for time as effects of climate change are already being felt globally from California to Australia. Integrative, multidisciplinary approaches, involving analyses of crop accessions, using emerging mathematical modeling techniques and high throughput omic technologies, including phenomics, genomics, proteomics, and transcriptomics, are urgently needed to develop climate-change resilient crops in a timely fashion. These approaches will provide us with the means to achieve the rapid and cost-efcient identication of genes and genomic regions associated with climate-change adaptive traits and accelerate crop improvement programs to maintain genetic diversity, safeguard food security, and improve livelihoods as a result of global warming and climate change.

To seek answers and to chart the way forward to mitigate the effects of climate change, an international workshop on “Applied Mathematics and Omics Technologies for Discovering Biodiversity and Genetic Resources for Climate Change Mitigation and Adaptation for Sustainable Agriculture in Drylands” was held at Rabat, Morocco, June 24–27, 2014. Twenty-two papers prepared by numerous scientists from ve continents (Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, and Australia) were presented. Sponsorship and support were received from 12 international organizations and universities.

This international workshop initiative was an imperative follow-up to other major global initiatives, such as the Mathematics of Planet Earth (MPE2013) initiative launched in 2013, and the Fourteenth Regular Session (April 15–19, 2013) of the UN FAO Commission on Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture, which emphasized the mobilization of crop genetic resources and the continued exploration of agro-biodiversity for climate change-related traits for adaption to and mitigation of changes in the climate. As highlighted in a recent international conference on “Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture in a Changing World” held in Lillehammer, Norway, January 27–29, 2014, genetic diversity plays a crucial role for climate-change mitigation and adaptation of agriculture to new climate patterns.

This workshop explored the use of a variety of applied mathematical approaches— including Bayes–Laplace inverse, approximation theorems, and fractal geometry in combination with phenomics and genomics—for rapid and cost-effective identi—cation of crop plants with climate-change adaptive traits. These approaches will help accelerate crop improvement to maintain biodiversity and food security and improve livelihoods in dryland areas under rapidly changing climatic conditions. This book is intended to provide the reader with a broad view of the interplay of biodiversity and answers to some of the latest problems in agriculture. It also highlights some of the ways to provide useful information to those who are in the battle to address the effects of global warming and climate change.

The International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA), together with its partners, aims to harness the research and capacity-building assets through its new platforms where cutting-edge applied mathematics will be used in combination with different omics technologies. The workshop addressed gender issues by engaging women researchers and addressed the transfer of innovation from and to farming communities. The workshop expanded further on the mathematical conceptual framework of solving practical problems such as drought, heat, diseases, and pest resistance. The chapters of this book re™ect, among many other things: