HEROCROP
KEY POINTS- Breeding for multistress resilience in wheat and pea
- Agroecological management
- Genotype × environment × management interaction
Project overview
Participants
More related research
Short summary
HEROCROP "Harnessing Emerging Resilient and Optimized CROP breeding to develop multi-stress ready agroecological systems across Europe’s diverse pedoclimatic regions" develops agroecological and breeding strategies to improve crop resilience to interacting stresses across European cropping systems.
Building resilience into cropping systems
Europe’s agriculture faces converging climatic and environmental pressures that increase multi-stress conditions, destabilise yields and expose the need for crop varieties and management practices adapted to low-input farming systems. HEROCROP responds to this challenge by shifting from single-factor optimisation to multi-stress realism, evaluating crop performance under realistic combinations of abiotic and biotic stresses such as drought, heat, nutrient limitations, weeds, pests and diseases. The project connects genetic diversity, crop physiology, agroecological management and digital technologies to generate actionable solutions for breeders, advisors and farmers.
HEROCROP focuses on wheat, pea and open-field tomato as representative crops of Europe’s cereal, protein and horticultural systems. The project works across contrasting Mediterranean, Atlantic, Boreal and South sub-continental pedoclimatic regions, using controlled experiments, coordinated field trials, phenotyping and modelling to understand and predict crop performance under current and future local farming conditions.
For more information, please see the project’s external website
The role of the SLU team
SLU mainly leads Work Package (WP) 4 and is also contributing to other WP. Work package 4 focuses on location-specific breeding and agroecological design for multistress resilience. The aim is to identify agroecological practices and crop variety–management combinations that improve crop performance, yield stability and resilience under environmental stress conditions.
A main part of SLU’s work is to lead the screening of agroecological practices through field trials. In wheat and pea, these trials will test combinations of management practices such as tillage, fertilisation, and a large range of undersown cover crops. Measurements will include crop phenology, stress responses and yield, together with assessments of relevant stress factors and agroecological effects.
The results will be used to select promising management strategies for later field trials with a focus on genotype × environment × management interactions, where selected crop varieties will be tested under management practices that are expected to improve crop resilience to stress factors that are relevant in a given region.