Participatory Plant Breeding. A method to adapt to climate change in low-input agriculture

Agriculture strongly depends on climate: even its very invention can be traced back to climate warming among a number of other factors. We know the basic conditions influencing plant development are air, light, warmth, humidity (Hatfield et al., 2017). These crucially depend on a few climatic factors, such as temperature, solar radiation, water and atmospheric CO2 concentration, influencing plant productivity according to the speciesphysiology (Fischer et al., 2002). A balanced interaction between a number of factors is required in order to maintain a specific plant under optimal development conditions. As an example, when temperatures increase, plant’s cells increase their activity too: this will require a continuous increase in water supply in order to keep the process working, otherwise, problems in development will arise.
As reported by IPCC (2014), most crop yields are extremely sensitive to daytime temperatures around 30° C, especially throughout the growing season. Therefore, temperature trends are extremely important for plants’ conditions and even slight changes can have detrimental consequences on crops: generally speaking we know that, all other things equal, cereal yields decrease with temperature and increase with solar radiation. Also, precipitation trends have important impacts on crops: limited water supply will decrease yields while an excess of it can have negative effects caused by waterlogging (Ceccarelli et al., 2013).
These examples give an idea of the relationships between climatic factors and agriculture: subtle alterations in one or more of the above-mentioned factors can lead to important effects on plant yields, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Thus, agriculture must comply with significant climate variability.