Unleashing a Decade of Innovation in Plant Science

Changes in climate and the rapidly increasing global population will require huge advances in science research and technology to meet the growing demand for food and fuel with limited resources.

In response, representatives of the plant science community have developed the Plant Science Decadal Vision that serves to educate the public and government about the need for advances in plant science that will be crucial to improving agriculture productivity.  The report describes a ten-year research agenda for plant science and its impacts on food, fuel, feed, fiber, pharmaceuticals, and American competitiveness.  The Decadal Vision requires the cooperation among many stakeholders to create crops that are flexible and adaptable to the challenges of environment and population.

The Decadal Vision stems from a two-phase Plant Science Research Summit held at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) in 2011 and again in December 2013, coordinated by the American Society of Plant Biologists, and supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), the U. S. Departments of Energy (DOE) and Agriculture (USDA) and HHMI.

Toni Kutchan, vice president for research at the Danforth Center, emphasized the important role technology, automation and bioinformatics will play in finding solutions in an era of “Big Data” science.

“Unless we want to be just stamp collectors, we need way of interrogating data sets we're collecting,” said Kutchan during her remarks at the briefing, Unleashing a Decade of Innovation in Plant Science: A Vision for 2015-2025, held in Washington D.C. in early December.

For more information and to view the report, click here.