Evolutionary Breeding and Climate Change

The genetic uniformity within, and typified by, most monocultural cereal-based systems has been shown to limit the crops’ capacity to evolve in response to adverse environmental conditions, thereby leading to a possible decrease in the yield stability of the cropping system. Deployment of significantly increased crop diversity across the global landscape has the potential to reduce the progress of crop epidemics, optimize yield stability, and positively enhance crop resilience in the ever-changing visage of climate-induced stress. One method of increasing genetic diversity within cereal crop populations is through evolutionary breeding (EB). In EB populations of self-pollinating cereals, natural selection acts upon the heterogeneous mixture of genotypes over generations and across environments and traits positively correlated to reproductive capacity increase over time. Crop populations with enhanced genetic diversity mimic natural ecological communities, which are better equipped to adapt to future unpredictable temporal climate shifts than are monocultures. Evolutionary participatory breeding merges the EB method with farmer selection to develop high-yielding, diseaseresistant cultivars while maintaining a high degree of genetic variation to allow for adaptability to fluctuations in environmental conditions. The EB method can contribute to the development of cropping systems with greater resilience and yield stability in the climate change era. K.M. Murphy (*) • A.H. Carter Department of Crop and Soil Sciences, Washington State University, Pullman, WA 99164-6420, USA e-mail: [email protected] S.S. Jones Northwestern Washington Research and Extension Center, Washington State University, Mount Vernon, WA 98273-4768, USA C. Kole (ed.), Genomics and Breeding for Climate-Resilient Crops, Vol. 1, DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-37045-8_9, # Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013 377