To face future challenges in crop production dictated by global climate changes, breeders and plant researchers collaborate to develop productive crops that are able to withstand a wide range of biotic and abiotic stresses. However, crop selection is often focused on shoot performance alone, as observation of root properties is more complex and asks for artificial and extensive phenotyping plat...

If climate change affects pollinator-dependent crop production, this will have important implications for global food security because insect pollinators contribute to production for 75% of the leading global food crops. We investigate whether climate warming could result in indirect impacts upon crop pollination services via an overlooked mechanism, namely temperature-induced shifts in the diu...

Senescence represents the final developmental act of the leaf, during which the leaf cell is dismantled in a coordinated manner to remobilize nutrients and to secure reproductive success. The process of senescence provides the plant with phenotypic plasticity to help it adapt to adverse environmental conditions. Here, we provide a comprehensive overview of the factors and mechanisms that contro...

As recent events have shown, simultaneous crop losses in different parts of the world can cause serious risks to global food security. However, to date, little is known about the spatial dependency of lower than expected crop yields from global breadbaskets. This especially applies in the case of extreme events, i.e., where one or more breadbaskets are experiencing far below average yields. Wit...

The ridge and furrow farming system for rainfall concentration (RC) has gradually been popularized to improve the water availability for crops and to increase the water use efficiency (WUE), thereby stabilizing high yields. In the RC system, plastic-covered ridges are rainfall harvesting zones and furrows are planting zones. In this study, we optimized the mulching patterns for RC planting to m...

Landscape-scale intensification of individual crops and pesticide use that is associated with this intensification is an emerging, environmental problem that is expected to have unequal effects on pests with different lifecycles, host ranges, and dispersal abilities. We investigate if intensification of a single crop in an agroecosystem has a direct effect on insecticide resistance in a special...

Viral diseases in crop plants constitute a major obstacle to food security in the developing world. Subsistence crops, including cassava, sweetpotato, potato, banana, papaya, common bean, rice and maize are often infected with RNA and/or DNA viruses that cannot be controlled with pesticides. Hence, healthy planting materials and virus-resistant cultivars are essential for high yields of good qu...

Low variability of crop production from year to year is desirable for many reasons, including reduced income risk and stability of supplies. Therefore, it is important to understand the nature of yield variability, whether it is changing through time, and how it varies between crops and regions. Previous studies have shown that national crop yield variability has changed in the past, with the d...

Global trends in pollinator-dependent crops have raised awareness of the need to support managed and wild bee populations to ensure sustainable crop production. Provision of sufficient forage resources is a key element for promoting bee populations within human impacted landscapes, particularly those in agricultural lands where demand for pollination service is high and land use and management ...

this paper shows the role of the general dynamic model in empirical research of production technology in agriculture. the model is a first order autoregressive multivariate specification, first developed by anderson and blundell. this model is general enough to nest several simpler dynamic as well as static models within it. therefore, it provides a framework for applying classical testing ...