Coordination Project (COP): Strategy, Dissemination, and Capacity Building

Global warming is intensifying extreme weather events which lead to more frequent and severe multiple abiotic and biotic stresses occurring concurrently or subsequently in farmer’s fields. Breeding multi-stress tolerant crop cultivars is urgently needed to meet the challenges of increasing food demands and risks. Yet, this is constrained by fundamental gaps in understanding the mechanisms that determine the interactions between abiotic and biotic stresses and their effects on crop performance under field conditions. Using maize as a model crop, the overall aim of the MultiStress RU is to revolutionize the mechanistic understanding of abiotic and biotic stress interactions in maize – targeting the field scale.