1University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan
2French National Institute of Agricultural Research, Paris, France
3Nanjing Agricultural University, Nanjing, China
4University of Tennessee, TN, USA
| Received 19 Dec 2018 |
Accepted 19 Dec 2018 |
Published 22 Jan 2019 |
Humankind is facing an unprecedented challenge to produce enough food for the coming decades because of population growth and increase in the average demand per capita, changes in climate conditions, and limitations in arable land area, as well as pressure on the water and resources. Two main avenues should be concurrently taken to increase crop productivity: improving genetics to get more efficient and resilient crops and developing optimal crop management practices. The description and understanding of crop functioning will therefore be instrumental both for genetic improvement and crop management. It will help to associate functional traits with the genome which will accelerate genetic progress by having more efficient techniques to design ideotypes adapted to particular pedoclimatic and crop management conditions and create them from the available genetic diversity. Similarly, knowledge of plant functioning will provide ways to take strategic and tactical decisions for optimal crop management within a given pedoclimatic, technical, and socioeconomic context. The modeling of crop functioning appears thus as a key element to formalize the accumulated knowledge on the ecophysiological processes that drive plant growth under given environmental conditions. Such models have already been developed for several species. They are based on the description of elementary processes using either mechanistic or empirically based approaches. These models are assembled at the plant and canopy levels to account for the complexity of the interactions between them. The validation and calibration of such models require conducting and compiling a large range of experiments under contrasted environmental conditions. However, such experiments targeting the elementary processes or the functioning of the whole plant and canopy need an ensemble of complementary measurements that are generally expensive, destructive, and low-throughput. While such detailed ecophysiological measurements are expected to be achieved, they can be complemented by repeated observations of the form and structure of organs, plants, canopies, and cellular components from which information on the corresponding functioning will be extracted. This corresponds to the emerging domain of plant phenomics.
