Plant breeding has been enormously successful in increasing the yield, variety, and quality of crops we consume on a daily basis. However, it is a major challenge to meet the growing global demand for affordable agricultural products while adapting to climate change (leading to heat waves, droughts, floods, diseases, pests and poor soil) and increasing sustainability-driven constraints on agriculture. This challenge is further exacerbated by growing populations, dietary changes, and declining farmlands. A key element in addressing these challenges is the development of climate-resilient crops that, thanks to new genomic makeups and cultivation methods, thrive even under more variable, more unpredictable, and more often extreme abiotic and biotic stresses. Resilience is, however, a highly complex trait with multiple genes and processes interacting simultaneously and/or over time, involving many trade-offs. Even the most advanced current plant breeding techniques lack the ability to efficiently select for such traits. Moreover, actors in food systems around the world may have diverging views on what resilience traits are most important for their specific context, while the development and uptake of climate-resilient crops may also face various non-technological challenges related to organizational routines, government regulations, and market structures.
Thus, the CropXR institute was funded to disentangle these complex traits, develop a generation of more resilient crops, and train scientists in state-of-the-art methodologies which provide insights into the most important processes underlying plant performance under stress and subsequent societal deployment of these innovations. Such state-of-the-art approaches are highly multidisciplinary, combining recent developments in plant science, social science, and data science and modelling, and thus requires trained experts with affinity for combining all these aspects. In this minor, students will learn fundamental concepts of all three areas, the fields’ latest developments, and major challenges related to their integration. With this knowledge, we expect them to be able to tackle stakeholder needs and problems by providing sustainable and innovative solutions to develop climate-change resilient and future proof crops.