Accelerated Diversification for Climate Resilient Agriculture (Improve)
Working with partners in Sub-Saharan Africa to conserve and characterize edible plant species with projected high resilience to future climates.
This is workstream 2 of the Accelerated Diversification for Climate Resilient Agriculture (ADCRA) project (see workstream 1 here).
Kew is working with in-country partners to develop three focus crops for sustainable agriculture under climate change: white fonio millet, Malagasy yams, and rice beans. We are identifying heat and drought resilient varieties and will improve domestication traits for greater farmer and consumer acceptance.
• Three PhD projects with in-country partners, to investigate white fonio, Malagasy yam, and rice bean climate resilience.
• Genome sequencing and analysis of climate resilient varieties of white fonio, Malagasy yams, and rice bean.
• Improvement of domestication-related traits in the three crops.
• Phenotypic characterization of improved white fonio, Malagasy yams, and rice bean.
Workstream Lead
Caspar Chater, Senior Research Leader
Project coordinator
Georja Said
- Deliverable 1: Caspar Chater, Georja Said
- Deliverable 2: Caspar Chater, Georja Said
- Deliverable 3: Rafal Gutaker, Amy Jackson
- Deliverable 4: Emma Wallington, Melanie Craze, Lizo Masters, Amy Jackson, Caspar Chater
- Deliverable 5: Caspar Chater
- NIAB, Cambridge, UK
- CSIR-Savanna Agricultural Research Institute (CSIR-SARI), Tamale, Ghana
- Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Kumasi, Ghana
- The Nelson Mandela African Institution of Science and Technology (NM-AIST). Arusha, Tanzania
- University of Antananarivo, Antananarivo, Madagascar
Gutaker RM, Chater C, Brinton J, Castillo-Lorenzo E, Breman E, Pironon S. 2022.
Scaling up neodomestication for climate-ready crops.
Current Opinion in Plant Biology. 66:102169
The Calleva Foundation