Breeding Fruit Crops for Cold Climates: Introduction to the Colloquium

Breeding Cold-hardy Fruit Crops in Minnesota

The Univ. of Minnesota has one of the oldest, continuous fruit breeding programs in North America. It serves a region that experiences all the vagaries of a continental climate, with temperatures ranging from above 35C in the summer to below – 40C in the winter. Precipitation, as rain during the growing season and snow during the dormant season, can vary dramatically from year to year. These wo...

Plant adaptation to cold climates

In this short review, I will first summarize criteria by which environments can be considered "cold", with plant stature (size, height above ground) playing a central role for the climate actually experienced. Plants adapted to such environments have to cope with both extremes and with gradual influences of low temperature. The first requires freezing resistance, which is tightly coupled to dev...

“icehouse” (cold) Climates

“icehouse” (cold) Climates

Earth's climate has changed, within life-sustaining bounds, from warm to cool intervals, on scales from thousands to hundreds of millions of years. In the Phanerozoic Eon there have been three intervals of glaciation (Ordovician, Carboniferous and Cenozoic) lasting tens of millions of years, with ice down to sea level at mid-latitudes (Frakes et al., 1992; Crowell, 1999). These cool " ice-house...

“icehouse” (cold) Climates