Functional rhizosphere traits are of fundamental importance to increase the resistance and resilience of yields to future climate change. Still, an optimization of belowground plant-soil interactions has been rarely considered in plant breeding schemes. Over the past 50 years, crops have been selected under favorable water and nutrient conditions and have hardly adapted to erratic weather conditions such as droughts. Thus, rhizosphere strategies may have been selected that perform best under uniform (in space) and constant (in time) resource supply. Consequently, breeding for highly productive crop varieties with little investments in the root and rhizosphere may have reduced the resistance and resilience of yields to drought.

Future agroecosystems in South Germany will suffer from increasing abiotic stress such as summer droughts. Are key rhizosphere strategies capable of increasing the resistance and resilience of crops under drought in order to secure yields? To answer this question, a comparative approach is chosen in this project, which focuses on high yield varieties vs. landraces of maize and wheat.

Prof. Dr. Johanna Pausch

Agroecology, University of Bayreuth
Universitätsstr. 30, 95447 Bayreuth
johanna.pausch@uni-bayreuth.de

Technical University of Munich (Soil Biophysics and Environmental Systems),
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (Institute of Meteorology and Climate Research),
Bavarian State Research Center for Agriculture
(Institute of Agroecology and Organic Farming),
Leibniz Centre for Agriculture Landscape Research (Working Group Root-soil Interactions),
University of Würzburg (Department of Remote Sensing)