Plant Breeding in the Digital Era.

Over the past century agricultural production has been greatly accelerated through improved agronomic practices and technological advancements. The recent convergence of genomic and environmental data, statistical methodologies, and computational approaches has opened new avenues for using diverse types of data in the breeding process. Some of these approaches, such as genomic selection, have already drastically changed the way plant breeding is done with significant impacts on efficiency and genetic gain. Other fields such as high-throughput, automated field phenotyping and genome editing emerged more recently but are expected to have an increasing impact in the future. For plant breeding as a discipline, these trends raise questions about what it means to be a plant breeder and how the practice will continue to evolve. This presentation will pose some of those relevant questions and describe how the plant breeding profession is evolving from the point of view of the seed industry.