Phenotyping Crop Variety Mixtures with Flavian Tschurr and Corina Oppliger

“Mixing things up! Identifying early diversity benefits and facilitating the development of improved variety mixtures with high throughput field phenotyping” with Flavian Tschurr and Corina Oppliger. With increasing yield instability in monocropping systems due to diseases, pests or climatic factors, crop diversification is a potential strategy to improve crop performance and yield stability. However, crop diversification can present challenges in agronomic management and operations. One promising approach to crop diversification is using multiple varieties of one crop rather than multiple species. However, challenges remain in selecting suitable crop varieties and determining their optimum mixture rates. In this episode, graduate students Flavian Tschurr and Corina Oppliger share their insights on using image-based high-throughput phenotyping to optimize crop variety mixtures. Tune in to learn: ·         What is a crop variety mixture? ·         What are the benefits of crop variety mixture? ·         What is the use of high throughput phenotyping in crop improvement? ·         What is crop over-yielding? If you would like more information about this topic, this episode’s paper is available here: https://doi.org/10.1002/ppj2.20090 This paper is always freely available. Contact us at podcast@sciencesocieties.org or on Twitter @FieldLabEarth if you have comments, questions, or suggestions for show topics, and if you want more content like this don’t forget to subscribe. If you’d like to see old episodes or sign up for our newsletter, you can do so here: https://fieldlabearth.libsyn.com/. If you would like to reach out to Flavian Tschurr, you can find him here: flavian.tschurr@usys.ethz.ch If you would like to reach out to Corina Oppliger, you can find her here: corina.oppliger@usys.ethz.ch If you would like to reach out to Fiona Todd from our Student Spotlight, you can find her here: todd0179@umn.edu   Resources CEU Quiz: https://web.sciencesocieties.org/Learning-Center/Courses/Course-Detail?productid=%7bDDE42A24-8B81-EF11-AC21-000D3A3B1B33%7d Transcripts: Coming soon ETH Zurich, Institute for Agricultural Sciences: https://kp.ethz.ch/ ETH Zurich Mastadon: https://scicomm.xyz/@crop_science_eth ETH Zurich Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/crop.science.eth/ Field phenotyping platform- https://kp.ethz.ch/infrastructure/FIP.html Research paper on crop variety mixture - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-021-01497-x Field, Lab, Earth is Copyrighted by the American Society of Agronomy, Crop Science Society of America, and Soil Science Society of America.