Location: Plant, Soil and Nutrition Research
Project Number: 8062-21000-052-012-A
Project Type: Cooperative Agreement
Start Date: Oct 1, 2023
End Date: Sep 30, 2025
Objective:
The objective of this research is to determine the potential impact of maintaining more N in maize fields on crop yield, resilience, and sustainability in the US under current and future climates (AIMS1 & 2). This is complemented by a gene and allele discovery pipeline that aims at reducing N in kernels (AIM 3), remobilize N back to the roots (AIM 4), and understanding the relationship of variation in stover composition with nitrogen loss (AIM 5). By the end of year , we should have a clear effective modeling of these nitrogen traits from plant to farm, candidate genes and pathways identified across four trait areas, potential implications for policy, and a set of priority traits and strategies that can be advanced in future public and private partnerships.
Approach:
The Cooperator will focus their research on AIMS 1 and 2. The Cooperator will lead a multi-pronged approach including experimentation, analysis of long-term N management experiments, and modeling of plant and soil processes to improve the representation and capacity to simulate N fluxes in the farm. The collaborator will adapt DSSAT, SALUS and Ecosys maize models to simulate adaptive traits for plant N dynamics. Second, the collaborator will lead the impact assessment of Nitrogen traits to improve maize productivity and GHG emissions in current and future climates. The collaborator will fuse crop growth models (DSSAT) and various genomic wide prediction (GBLUP, XGBoost, etc.) via global and local optimization.
