News

Joint research on sustainable crop production in preparation

Published on: February 5, 2020

The ERA-NET-Cofund on Sustainable Crop Production (SusCrop) has pre-announced its second transnational Call in the field of sustainable crop production. Proposals need to demonstrate how the project results will be relevant to improved crop production under a changing climate and/or to climate change mitigation. In addition, greater emphasis is put on how projects might contribute to food and nutritional security in the light of climate change. Proposals can be submitted for both basic and applied research. They must be multidisciplinary and should address at least one of the following topics:

1. Enhancement of new and/or predictive breeding technologies and the development of new genotypes leading to new phenotypes towards the release of improved crop varieties that are capable to adapt to future changes in environmental and climatic conditions. Projects could also target improvement of variety selection processes to support agroecological practices;

2. Development and exploitation of integrated pest and crop management methods and practices. This includes, for example, basic and translational research leading to practical on-farm applications and/or the development of novel detection systems for integrated pest and crop management;

3. Improvement of resource-use efficiency of cropping systems by agroecological approaches to increase the efficiency of nutrient, water and energy utilisation. This could include the use of improved crops;

4. Investigations on agricultural crops as part of an ecosystem. Studies must have a clear focus on interactions between plants and other organisms leading to practices that support more sustainable agriculture.

At present, there are at least 14 funding organisations from 11 countries (including France, Latvia, Germany, Estonia, United Kingdom, Poland, Belgium, Finland, Spain, Romania, and Turkey) involved. The call is expected to open on February 10^th. Proposed deadline for pre-proposals is April 7^th, for full proposal submission September 10^th.

More information, including the pre-proposal document, is available on the SusCrop website.