Sweetpotato biodiversity can help increase climate-resilience of small-scale farming, according to the findings of a study undertaken by researchers from the French public research institution IRD, CIRAD, and the CGIAR center, the International Potato Center (CIP).
Sweetpotato biodiversity can help increase climate-resilience of small-scale farming, according to the findings of a study undertaken by researchers from the French public research institution IRD, CIRAD, and the CGIAR center, the International Potato Center (CIP). The findings of this global analysis of the intraspecific diversity of the sweetpotato - one of the world’s most important food crops - demonstrate the role of this genetic diversity in the productivity and resilience of food and agricultural systems in the face of climate change. The results were published on 5 October in the Nature Climate Change journal.
Climate change poses a threat to the world’s subsistence crops. Heatwaves, which are likely to intensify according to climate evolution predictions, are generating levels of heat stress that are damaging to agricultural production. Identifying resistant crop varieties is therefore crucial to ensuring people’s food security and farmers’ resilience. To date, many studies have been conducted on varietal improvement, which involves developing and selecting plants with the required characteristics. Few, however, have examined intraspecific diversity, which is defined as the degree of genetic variety that exists within the same species.
Read more at: Institut de Recherche Pour le Developpement
a. The yellow dots mark the origin of each of the cultivars studied on the test site (the red star). The blue dots indicate the location of the most heat-stress tolerant varieties. b. Drone maps of the 4,040 test plots on the test site in Piura, Peru. c. Close-up of the delineated plots of sweet-potato cultivars. d. High-resolution thermographic image of the temperatures of the crop canopy under conditions of heat stress (lowest temperatures in blue, highest in red). (photo Credit: © Bettina Heider et al. Nature Climate Change)
