The plant science decadal vision.

The enormous challenges to 21st century societies that include rapidly rising global population, ensuring food security, the need for increased food production in the face of changing climates with lower agricultural inputs, guaranteeing adequate nutrition to reduce the global burden of chronic disease, and the escalating need for energy produced from renewable feedstocks, have been viewed as providing an unprecedented opportunity for raising the profile of plant science research. To be sure, plant science can contribute to addressing these grand challenges in innovative and sustainable ways. However, there is a danger that accompanies such an opportunity: that the plant science research community, long starved of adequate investment, acts without the appropriate prioritization of research for solutions that are not only scientifically feasible but also technologically implementable, beneficial for society, and truly sustainable. For this reason, the report that has come out of the American Plant Science Research Summit (Plant Science Research Summit, 2013) is particularly welcome. Focus and direction of the research to be undertaken to solve the world’s biggest and most urgent long-term problems must be paramount. The likely consequences for plant science, if it fails to deliver, are that it will lose the support of society and funding agencies. To put it another way, with increased investment comes greatly increased responsibilities, which require community oversight and prioritization. The Plant Science Decadal Vision has fleshed out the ideas raised in 2009 by the National Academies (National Research Council, 2009) on food, energy, environment, and health to propose five specific goals for shaping research on plants in the decade 2015 to 2025: 1) Increase the ability to predict plant traits from plant genomes in diverse environments 2) Assemble plant traits in different ways to solve problems 3) Discover, catalog, and utilize plantderived chemicals 4) Enhance the ability to find answers in a torrent of data 5) Create a T-training environment for plant science doctoral students