Introduction to Climate-Resilient Crops: Biology, Data & Society

How can we develop crops that can feed the world in the face of a changing climate? How can we leverage revolutionary tools in Artificial Intelligence and data science to develop such crops? And how can we do so in a socially responsible manner? This interdisciplinary course brings together knowledge from plant science, data science, and social science to equip you with the tools to tackle one of the most pressing issues of our time.

Plant breeding has revolutionized agriculture, boosting the yield, variety, and quality of crops. However, with a growing global population and increasing climate pressures, new challenges have emerged. Heatwaves, droughts, floods, pests, and poor soils hinder agriculture production. There is an urgent need to produce crops that can withstand these extreme and unpredictable conditions. This calls for climate-resilient crops that can thrive under unpredictable and extreme conditions. Yet, developing climate-resilient crops is highly complex. It requires knowledge of the interplay of numerous genes, processes, and the way trade-offs are balanced. Even the most advanced current plant breeding techniques lack the ability to efficiently select for such traits. Moreover, food producers around the world may have diverging views on which resilience traits are most beneficial for a specific context. In addition, there may be many other challenges. Think of obstacles related to organizational routines, government regulations and market structures. These can all impede the development and uptake of climate-resilient crops. Developing climate-resilient crops hence also requires sociological insights into the wider systems that these crops will be part of. For more information on this we refer to https://cropxr.org/.

Overall, successful deployment of climate-resilient crops thus requires an interdisciplinary approach, combining recent developments in plant sciences, data science and modelling, and social sciences. In this course, students will learn the fundamental concepts of these fields and how their core concepts are linked to resilient crops. Additionally, the course teaches students to integrate these fields through projects based on specific cases, focusing on the challenges and opportunities in developing and implementing climate-change-resilient and future-proof crops. You will practice interdisciplinary knowledge integration and communication.

• Identify their own knowledge gaps in the fields of plant sciences, social sciences and data sciences

• Understand basic elements of these fields and describe how these elements are related to the development of climate-resilient crops

• Describe the latest developments at the intersection of these fields

• Explain the importance and challenges of integrating these fields  for climate resilient crops and apply these insights to a case-study

• Assignment reflection report (%) Re-submission of an improved version of an insufficiently graded reflection report is possible in the resit period.
• Written test with open and closed questions (60%)
• Assignment poster (%) Group size 3-4 students. Re-submission of an improved version of an insufficiently graded poster is possible in the resit period.
• Assignment other (40%) Group size 3-4 students. This assignment is a podcast. Re-submission of an improved version of an insufficiently graded podcast is possible in the resit period.

• Reading material will be made available on Brightspace.