BioSS Showcase - Peatland Plants and Crop Variety Trials

Mark Brewer, Claire Harris and Tess Vernon (BioSS)

Tuesday 25th April, 2023 13:00-14:00 Maths 311B

Abstract

What is BioSS? Mark will briefly answer this question before giving way to two colleagues who will talk about their recent work, using advanced statistical and biomathematical method to solve important biological and environmental problems.

Claire Harris - Modelling peatland plant life

Peatlands are hugely important ecosystems in the UK, responsible for storing 3 billion tonnes of CO2 – twice as much as our forests. Unfortunately, they are also hugely degraded and vulnerable to climate change. Plants are a vital component of the peatland ecosystem, but are often overlooked by models. Peatlands also evolve and change over long timescales (millennia), but site managers need to know how plants will respond to climate and land-use change in the short to medium term (next century). One such site is Cors Fochno, a raised bog in Wales with a history of drainage, peat cutting and subsequent restoration. Here, we apply EcoSISTEM, an agent-based model of plant species interacting with each other and their environment. Models like this are a useful tool to ask questions of a system and how it might behave under different conditions, e.g. what happens to the site under rainfall predicted by UKCP RCP 8.5? How much worse would it be if we didn’t block up the drainage ditches? In this talk I’ll discuss our work so far on peatlands and explore our future plans for EcoSISTEM.

Tess Vernon - Feeding the UK: Crop Variety Trials 

Changing climates and political situations drive a need to adapt the way we feed the world. BioSS works with partners worldwide to improve methodologies used to select optimal plant varieties for our changing environments. Our crop variety trials work ranges from DUS testing, where all crops are assessed for Distinctness, Uniformity and Stability to protect the rights associated with registered varieties, to performance testing for all agricultural crops, which is a requirement to allow marketing of a new variety. We also conduct further performance testing in the UK to provide information for growers on optimal varieties for their locations. Here we look at several research projects BioSS is currently undertaking aiming to improve our variety trials system, including looking at shading in winter barley trials (where taller varieties stunt the yields of neighbouring shorter varieties), investigating the effects of spatial variation in variety trials, improving prediction of variety performance in future years, and improving methods for assessing the uniformity of new varieties. This talk will also touch on the INVITE project, where BioSS is working with partners from across Europe to improve both the efficiency of variety testing and the information available to stakeholders on variety performance under a range of production conditions and biotic and abiotic stresses.

Email wei.zhang.2@glasgow.ac.uk for Zoom link.

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