Check it out: Tree Fruit Breeders’ Approaches to the Challenges of a Changing Climate

By Sonia A. Hall, Center for Sustaining Agriculture and Natural Resources, Washington State University

With my colleagues on the AgClimate.net team we’ve been discussing plant breeding and climate change for a while, and are actually working on some articles about that relating to our Pacific Northwest crops and growing conditions. So I was intrigued to see this article by Leslie Mertz in the Good Fruit Grower magazine titled Breeding for uncertainty. Mertz starts off by saying “Developing a new tree-fruit cultivar is a long process that begins with breeders deciding which specific traits growers will want 15, 20 or even 30 years into the future.” And close to the end she states “Of course, breeding for the future is always difficult, but it has been made much more so with the extent and effects of climate change being unknown.” In between, though, Mertz discusses existing breeding programs that have used expected future climate conditions to select traits to focus on, and are taking on the added challenge of uncertainty about future climates. Check it out.

And stay tuned for some other articles exploring how climate change intersects with plant breeding efforts underway in the Pacific Northwest.