CSI Seminar Aaron Kusmec, Apr 8 at 11 AM CT

The Center for Sorghum Improvement (CSI) is hosting a virtual seminar given by Aaron Kusmec, an Assistant Professor in Crop Quantitative Genetics at Kansas State University’s Department of Agronomy, on Tuesday, April 8 at 11 AM CT.  The title of the talk is, “The past is not the future: Lessons from 80 years of maize breeding for adaptation to future climates.” Dr. Kusmec will discuss breeding strategies to address the challenges that future climate conditions pose for crop production, including rising average temperatures, increased climatic variability, and more frequent compound events like concurrent droughts and heat waves. While mechanistic crop growth models (CGMs) have been commonly used to evaluate breeding and management strategies, their ability to accurately simulate extreme climatic effects is limited. An alternative, yet underexplored, approach involves leveraging empirical relationships derived from observational data. This talk will explore challenges of breeding for future climates using an 80-year dataset of public hybrid maize yield trials, historical climate records, and simulations of 21st-century climate scenarios. For information on this and future seminars visit the CSI seminar webpage.