Grant: Research Tools and Instruments

Food safety and security are global concerns that have significant impacts on both public health and economic stability. In 2014, the agriculture and agri-food system generated $108.1 billion, accounting for 6.6% of Canada's gross domestic product (http://www.agr.gc.ca). In British Columbia, the value of the agri-food and seafood industry was $13.03 billion in 2015; $1.53 billion were solely due to crop production. Crop yield and quality are very sensitive to environmental factors, and seasonal climate can determine whether a given years crop production is profitable or not. Increasing frequency of extreme climatic events (heat, drought, floods) and limited resource availability (water, nutrients) will put unprecedented strains globally on crop production systems, and across Canadian agricultural regions. Farmers must continuously cope with threats and adapt their production strategies to specific climatic conditions and seasonal pressures (e.g., by managing water inputs according to needs or by spraying pesticides to protect crops from pest outbreaks). In order to sustain Canadian crop production, it is imperative to better understand the impacts of changing climate on crop physiology, crop ecology, including changes to insect interaction and soil microbial communities, and crop-soil biogeochemistry. This proposal will support the purchase of two growth chambers that will be used by Drs. Castellarin, Carrillo, Black, Smukler, and Upadhyaya, all faculty members in the UBC Faculty of Land and Food Systems, and Johnson (UBC Faculty of Science) to work on projects that aim to elucidate the mechanisms controlling crop response to environmental factors and climate change. The infrastructure is necessary for several ongoing and future research projects that are currently funded by, e.g., NSERC Discovery, Engage, and CRC programs. We expect that the research conducted with this infrastructure will provide critical knowledge to support BC, Canadian, and international scientists and farmers in developing crop management strategies to optimize production, minimizing inputs and negative outputs (greenhouse gases emission) under future climate scenarios. Dr. Castellarin and co-applicants are currently training a large number of undergraduate and graduate students, postdoctoral fellows; this new platform will provide unique opportunities for improving their training using research infrastructure that enables new experiments in a highly controlled environment where future climatic scenarios can be simulated, and the impact on crop physiology and productivity and soil and insect ecology can be explored.