Climate Change From a Plant Breeder's Perspective.

Climate change has two main aspects that plant breeders need to consider.  The first aspect will be the ecogeographic climate trends specific to their target set of environments.  The trends will occur over periods of time (25 to 100 years) that are far longer than a breeding cycle (from cross to finished hybrid or cultivar which often takes 6 to 12 years).  Hence plant breeders will be able to respond to these trends through the use of conventional and emerging technologies (doubled haploidy, genomic selection, high throughput phenotyping, bioinformatics).    The second aspect will be increased weather variability around the long-term trend lines.  This increased variability cannot be predicted, is far shorter than the predicted trend lines or breeding cycle, and may greatly affect agricultural production at a time when food security is increasingly tenuous.  The challenge to plant breeders will be to increase overall productivity, while assuring this productivity is less susceptible to rapid weather fluctuations during the growing season.  Plant breeders and agronomists will also need to be more efficient with inputs to increases economic viability and sustainability.   This challenge will require a much better understanding of our germplasm, the underlying genetics, and the epistasis among genes.  It will also require community effort and a constant search for new germplasm, genes (we may not have the genes we need in our adapted or cultivated gene pool), and strategies for their use.