Drought Solutions for Producers Start Small
Understanding and addressing agriculture’s biggest climate change challenges starts at the microscopic level for plant physiologist Dr. Thorsten Knipfer. This pioneering researcher and his team in the Plant-Water Relations Lab are working to decipher—from a cellular to a whole plant basis—the complex ways woody perennials react to drought caused by limited soil water availability.
The aim is to use these insights to create far more efficient irrigation approaches for farmers, helping producers to secure their harvest while summers become hotter and drier. These new strategies, says Dr. Knipfer, require a fundamental knowledge of how a crop plant actually operates.
“It’s like a mechanic trying to fix a car,” he says. “You need to know how the engine works before you can start working on any solutions.”
Focusing their recent research on hazelnut crops, the team is collaborating with B.C. growers to establish irrigation baselines—as well as how far crops can be pushed from these baselines and yet still fulfill vital functions such as photosynthesis, xylem transportation and storage. “It’s about developing irrigation management strategies that are built on the actual needs of the crop,” says Dr. Knipfer.
“We already know that effective irrigation management needs to be about much more than just adding a bunch of water.”
Effective crop monitoring and physiological measurements are the cornerstone of this kind of research, says Dr. Knipfer, whose team deploys both traditional and cutting-edge tools. That means using pressure chambers and leaf gas exchange systems as well as advanced imaging systems. “We’ve been collaborating with Saskatoon’s Canadian Light Source. Their synchrotron is teaching us a lot about how a plant’s water transport system is impacted during severe drought.”
It’s this integrated view of climate change challenges on crops that Dr. Knipfer says is essential to building any new optimized management approaches. “We’re researching agricultural plant processes at the cellular level and we’re then extrapolating these findings to the field scale. It’s a way of tackling big picture problems by digging deep down to the smallest level.”
Tagged with: 2024, Plant Science
