Informations et ressources scientifiques
sur le développement des zones arides et semi-arides

Long-term Europe-Africa Research and Innovation Partnership for Food and Nutrition Security and Sustainable Agriculture

Titre : EXPLOWHEAT : Exploring durum wheat genotypes to minimize drought stress impact on grain yield and nutritional quality

Pays/Région : Italy ; Spain ; Algeria ; Tunisia

Date : Start date 2020-01-01 // End date 2023-01-01

Identifiant : 248-EXPLOWHEAT
Type de projet : Development and innovation oriented (research) project

Contexte
Low-resource environments (e.g., dry or infertile soils) result in limited growth and development, which in turn constrain crop productivity. Drought is viewed as the single most important environmental stress decreasing crop productivity and it will be a major challenge for European agriculture due to climate change projections. Drought may cause nutrient deficiencies even in fertilized fields. The mechanisms that plants have evolved for nutrient uptake, translocation and assimilation may not function optimally under drought conditions. It is generally accepted that fertilization is most effective when plants are not water-stressed, and that irrigation is most effective when nutrients are not limited. Considering that most vegetable and seed crops are cultivated in semiarid areas and in regions suffering from temporary drought, it is important not only to ascertain how water stress affects the nutrient uptake and assimilation capability of these crops but also to identify genes/genotypes to increase crop resilience to face drought and nutrient deficiency under an indisputable climate change.

Objectif
EXPLOWHEAT will focus on durum wheat, a strategic staple food crop in the Mediterranean area and the overall ambition of the project is to exploit Mediterranean biodiversity to identify more resilient genes and/or crop genotypes able to cope with suboptimal water, and with unbalanced nutrient availability deriving from drought, in order to underpin improvement of crop management strategies for future agricultural use. The final goal will be to optimise the crop efficiency and sustainability of water, soil nutrients and fertilizer use, to improve the competitiveness and sustainability of Mediterranean agriculture whilst minimizing environmental impacts. Taken as a whole, this strategy has the objective of exploiting Mediterranean biodiversity for a more sustainable agriculture in terms of water and nutrient use efficiency (WUE and NUE).

Coordinateur : Tuscia University (UNITUS)
Partenaires : University of Turin Ferhat Abbas Sétif University 1 CSIC - Spanish National Research Council Center of Biotechnology of Sfax

Financement principal : Directorate-General for Research and Innovation (DG RTD) (H2020)
Budget : 836 998 EUR

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