NordForsk: Future Food Security in the Nordic-Baltic Region: Merging Past, Present, and Future

The Nordic-Baltic region is expected to experience some of the larges effects of global climate change in the next decades. To ensure long-term food security, Nordic-Baltic crops must be adapted to these shifts. Breeding a new crop variety can take decades and it is thus imperative that breeders begin creating the crops of the future today. For this, breeders need information on the expected future climate throughout the Nordic-Baltic region, information on how crop performance relates to observed weather and flexible statistics toolkits for projecting future crop performance based on projections of future climate. The purpose of this project is to build a Nordic-Baltic-level crop and climate information data store that allows Nordic and Baltic crop breeders to quickly access a broad array of weather and crop productivity information. In addition, the project aims to develop flexible statistical tools that will enable researchers to relate historical crop performance to weather and determine how future crops will perform in a changed Nordic-Baltic climate. This one-stop data repository and the associated statistical toolkit will enable crop scientists to more efficiently assess their breeding roadmap and improve their ability to begin creating tomorrow's crop varieties. After kicking off in 2023, 2024 has been spent surveying the Nordic agricultural community for various field trial data. We have met with individuals from Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Sweden and Finland and begun organizing the different field trial data present in each of these countries. We have created a prototype database agreed on a universal schema. In addition, we have begun with preliminary data analyses of these field trials and evaluated different methodologies for understanding gene by environment interactions. Simultaneously climate researchers have begun developing the Nordic-wide comprehensive climate projection database that will be used by the agricultural researchers in the final phase of the project.

The Nordic-Baltic region is expected to experience some of the largest effects of global climate change in the next decades. To ensure long-term food security, Nordic-Baltic crops must be adapted to these shifts. Breeding a new crop variety can take twenty to thirty years. Breeders thus must begin creating the crops of the future today. For this, breeders need information on the expected future climate throughout the Nordic-Baltic region. In addition, they need historical information that relates crop performance to observed weather, in a format tailored to their objectives. Ideally, they also have access to a purpose-built statistical toolkit that can flexibly relate observed performance to historical weather and thereby project the performance of new crop varieties in the future Nordic-Baltic climate. Much of this information can be found already, but it exists across a broad range of different sources or in a format not immediately useful to crop scientists. The purpose of this consortium is to build a Nordic-Baltic-level crop and climate information data store that allows Nordic and Baltic crop breeders to quickly access a broad array of weather and crop productivity information. In addition, we will provide flexible statistical tools that will enable researchers to relate historical crop performance to weather and determine how future crops will perform in a changed Nordic-Baltic climate. In NorBalFoodSec, NR is the project leader and the one data scientist partner in the consortium. In addition to organising and administrating the project, NR is involved in all project tasks and co-leading all WPs. NMBU is one of several academic crops scientist partners and Graminor is a plant breeding company. Graminor and NMBU are involved in WP1 (crop modelling), task 3.1 of WP3 (repository of variety trial data) and WP4 (outreach and dissemination). Graminor is also co-leading WP1. The progress plan thus includes all main activities and milestones for the project.