Applied Mathematics and Omics to Assess Crop Genetic Resources for Climate Change Adaptive Traits

Genetic diversity of crop plants is being further explored and exploited to generate higher crop yield, better disease resistance, and more nutritional value. This book focuses on using genetic resources to mitigate the effects of climate change and increase crop production. It emphasizes recent advances in mathematics and omics technologies addressing issues related to adaptation of crops to changing climatic conditions. Exhaustive sections cover climate change implications for drylands and farming communities; genetic resources/biodiversity’s potential to adapt and mitigate climate change; applied mathematics and applied omics technologies; as well as genomics and gene identification.

Abdallah Bari is a researcher focusing on applied mathematics in agricultural research. He received his PhD in imaging techniques to assess genetic variation for water-use efficiency from the University of Cordoba, Spain. His research involves elaborating and applying mathematical models and theoretical aspects to seek practical solutions, such as the application of fractal geometry to capture complex trait variation in plants. He has published peer-reviewed articles and chapters and has edited a book on the assessment of genetic resources for water-use efficiency. He collaborates with researchers from universities, research institutions, and development organizations to explore new frontiers of applied mathematics in agricultural research to address climate change issues.

Ardeshir B. Damania is an associate in the Agricultural Experimental Station (AES) at the University of California, Davis. He received his PhD in crop plant genetic resources from the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom. His current research interests include climate change, biodiversity conservation, origins of agriculture, crop domestication, and plants of economic and medicinal values. He has edited a number of books, includingBiodiversity and Wheat Improvement, which has been translated into Chinese. He has authored numerous papers in refereed international journals and articles in the popular press on wheat improvement, conservation of genetic resources, and Asian agricultural history.

Michael Mackay is an honorary associate professor at the Queensland Alliance for Agriculture and Food Innovation, an institute based at the University of Queensland, St. Lucia in Brisbane, Australia. He received his PhD from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences. His main research interest is in how pre-breeders and breeders actually go about identifying and using plant genetic resources. This research eventually led to the development of a different approach known as Focused Identification of Germplasm Strategy (FIGS) in a collaborative Grains Research and Development Corporation project between ICARDA, the AWCC, and the N. I. Vavilov Research Institute of Plant Industry in St. Petersburg, Russia. He has published more than 40 articles, including book chapters, refereed scientific papers, and conference proceedings.

Selvadurai Dayanandan is a professor and graduate program director in the biology department of Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. He received his PhD in biology from Boston University. He was director of the graduate diploma program in biotechnology and genomics at Concordia University as well as an Izaak W. Killam postdoctoral fellow at the University of Alberta. His current research focuses on understanding the origin and maintenance of biodiversity in forest and agricultural landscapes using genomics technologies. He has published extensively in the field of biodiversity conservation, ranging from socioeconomic factors and tropical deforestation through the population, conservation, and evolutionary genomics of forest trees and crop plants.