Periodic Reporting for period 3 - InnoVar (Next generation variety testing for improved cropping on European farmland)
Reporting period: 2022-10-01 to 2023-09-30
Introducing ways to evaluate plant varieties for sustainability and resilience will benefit society by producing food that requires fewer agro-chemical input by promoting varieties that are better adapted to specific growing scenarios. This will create food production systems that are more efficient, sustainable and resilient whilst using fewer chemical inputs.
InnoVar will draw together expertise and knowledge from across crop science, bioinformatics, soil science, meteorology, and computer science to develop and deliver methods and tools to achieve greater efficiency in plant variety testing processes and in the use of resources on-farm, enabling the EU and its farmers to maximise the potential of their land, in terms of both yield and environmental sustainability (including adaptation to climate change and environmental resilience).
The key objectives are to:
1. Identify crop characteristics and sustainability criteria which indicate the capacity of varieties to maintain yield under more variable conditions and more sustainable crop management practices.
2. Develop precise, rapid and automated methods and trialling processes to provide data on characters that contribute to the capacity of new varieties to maintain yield under more variable conditions and sustainable crop management practices.
5. Apply the methods and techniques developed for wheat to other cereals and other crop types, including oilseeds, grasses, legumes, sugar beet, maize, etc.
6. Develop new tools for the evaluation and detection of variety characteristics, using genomic, phenomic and digital technologies.
7. Analyse and review existing systems for providing and delivering information about varieties and facilitate variety specialists in adopting and developing new effective methods and tools for dissemination.
By month 48 of the project, all DUS and VCU field trials have been completed. In addition to the core VCU trials, two years of organic trials, and one year of Nitrogen trials have been completed. Upload of trial data is near completion. Phenomic data has been collected from selected DUS and VCU trials and a pipeline for integration into the InnoVar database is complete. Genome-wide SNP analysis for all genotypes is complete and GWAS analysis is in progress. Phenotyping, phenomic and genomic data, together with the soil and weather data from the trial sites, is being analysed using the new machine learning models produced within the project. These models are ready to be deployed once the database has been full populated with the extensive data generated by the project
Evaluation of current recommendation systems has been completed and provides a valuable summary for post-registration VCU testing. The High-Performance Low-Risk (HPLR) categorisation system has been progressed and is being refined and tested using data generated by the project.
Dissemination and communication of the project is progressing. An interactive website has been launched with relevant information for the variety community, the seed community and the agri-food value chain across Europe, alongside other stakeholders interested in innovations in plant variety testing. InnoVar's social media presence has been very successful to date and the project has a presence on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube. An IP management and exploitation plan is in place to optimise the value project data.