Wheat crop production is at the basis of food security in France and Europe. The French Ministry of Agriculture reports stagnation in wheat production from the early 2000's.

Models of climate change predict a rise of the median temperature by about 2 degrees by 2050. Wheat yield is predicted to decrease by 6% for each degree, but the increase in the number of early spring frosts (during the stem elongation) and late spring heat waves (during the grain filling) may regularly result in even more drastic losses.

Precision agriculture and site-specific crop management is a growing concept in farming. The goal of these novel techniques is to define a decision support system for optimizing yields and preserving resources. In combination with modeling, these new tools may help to accelerate plant breeding for adaptation to climate change and enable the translation from field experimentation to customized solutions for farming.

We will aim at extending the techniques of plant phenotyping and crop monitoring to quantitative photosynthesis measurements using the new portable instrument MultispeQ 2.0. Using photosynthetic parameters as a proxy for better crop management will also allow us to track the adverse effects extreme climatic events have on crop photosynthesis.

Our first objective is to acquire and share more contextualized data. Our workplan is to oversample photosynthesis parameters during wheat growth, field experiments will be conducted in spring. Students will test for correlations between parameters, identify trends and propose interpretations.

Our second objective is to build and test predictive crop models in terms of decision support for farming, of plant stress related to climate change, and of identification of traits for breeding.