Jana Kholova

International Crops Research Institute for Semi Arid Tropics | ICRISAT · crops physiology

The cultivation of pearl millet in India is experiencing important transformations. Here, we propose a new characterization of the pearl millet production environment using the latest available district level data (1998–2017), principal component analysis, and large-scale crop model simulations. Pearl millet cultivation environment can be divided i...

Finger millet, grown on about 5 Mha globally under semi-arid environments of East Africa and South Asia, serves as an important dual-purpose crop to address food, forage, and nutritional needs in these marginal regions. Despite the tremendous yield potential, the area cultivated for small millets, including finger millet, decreased by 25.7% globall...

The identification of haplotypes influencing traits of agronomic interest, with well-defined effects across environments, is of key importance to develop varieties adapted to their context of use. It requires advanced crossing schemes, multi-environment characterization and relevant statistical tools. Here we present a sorghum multi-reference back-...

The cultivation of pearl millet in India is experiencing important transformations due to changes in weather, socio-economic trends, and technological progress. In this scope, we propose a new characterization of the pearl millet production environment in India using the latest available data and methodology. For that, we constructed a database inc...

We present a new algorithm for pearl millet simulation in APSIM. Compared to the actual released model, this new model increases the ability to simulate dynamic tillers by integrating recent progresses about biological understanding of the tillering mechanism. The new algorithm also offers the possibility to have an increased genetic control over k...

Production of phosphorus efficient genotypes in groundnut can improve and also reduces environmental pollution. Identification of P-efficient groundnut genotypes is a need of the hour to sustain in P-deficient soils. The pot experiment showed significant differences between genotypes (G) and treatments (T) for all the traits and G × T interaction f...

Introduction Pearlmillet is themain subsistence crop for smallholder farmers systemswhere it is grown at low plant density. Intensifying pearl millet cultivation could boost productivity although it may have trade-offs. Increasing planting density would indeed increase the leaf area and the related water budget, whereas a denser canopy could create...

The interpretation of crop water management practices has been central to the archeological debate on agricultural strategies and is crucial where the type of water strategy can provide fundamental explanations for the adoption and use of specific crops. Traces of water administration are difficult to detect and are mostly indirect, in the form of...

Indoor experiments with individual plants often show that transpiration rate is restricted under high vapor pressure deficit (VPD), resulting in a plateau of transpiration that increases water use efficiency (WUE) of some genotypes. We tested this hypothesis outdoors during dry or rainy seasons of India and Senegal, based on the response of the tra...

The Triadic Comparison of Technologies (tricot) approach is a citizen science methodology with a high potential to improve the development of context specific crop varieties and accelerate their adoption among smallholder farmers. We evaluated this methodology with 200 tribal farmers from the Adilabad District (Telangana, India) to select dual-purp...

Drought stress significantly affects chickpea production. The "QTL-hotspot", a genomic region on pseudomolecule Ca4 in chickpea that harbours major-effect quantitative trait loci (QTLs) for multiple drought-adaptive traits, represents a promising target for improving chickpea drought adaptation. To investigate the mechanisms underpinning the positi...

Purpose Although the coordination between stomatal closure and aboveground hydraulics has extensively been studied, our understanding of the impact of belowground hydraulics on stomatal regulation remains incomplete. Here, we investigated whether and how the water use of maize (Zea mays L.) varied under hydraulically contrasting soil textures. Our...

Chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) is one of the most important grain legumes in the world, but its current and future production is threatened due to the increased incidence of drought and heat stress. To address this challenge, an integrated crop improvement strategy encompassing breeding, genomics, physiology and agronomy is required. Here, we review...

The chapter highlights the interplay of high throughput phenotyping with crop growth models (CGMs). The chapter shows how crop models can be used to explore knowledge of phenotype, environment and genotype to better understand and predict their complex interrelationships. It describes how CGMs have been used in envirotyping and in setting targets f...

Background In India, raw peanuts are obtained by aggregators from smallholder farms in the form of whole pods and the price is based on a manual estimation of basic peanut pod and kernel characteristics. These methods of raw produce evaluation are slow and can result in procurement irregularities. The procurement delays combined with the lack of st...

Chickpea production is vulnerable to drought stress. Identifying the genetic components underlying drought adaptation is crucial for enhancing chickpea productivity. Here, we present the fine mapping and characterization of “QTL‐hotspot”, a genomic region controlling chickpea growth with positive consequences on crop production under drought. We re...

Achieving global goals for sustainable nutrition, health, and wellbeing will depend on delivering enhanced diets to humankind. This will require instantaneous access to information on food-source quality at key points of agri-food systems. Although laboratory analysis and benchtop NIR spectrometers are regularly used to quantify grain quality, thes...

Biosilica accumulation in plant tissues is related to the transpiration stream, which in turn depends on water availability. Nevertheless, the debate on whether genetically and environmentally controlled mechanisms of biosilica deposition are directly connected to water availability is still open. We aim at clarifying the system which leads to the...

Sorghum contributes to the livelihoods of millions of food-insecure households in semi-arid agri-systems. Annual production widely fluctuates throughout India due to erratic rainfall and suboptimal agronomic practices. Our novel approach utilizes the digital reflection of post-rainy (rabi) sorghum production systems in India to help better understa...

Sorghum plays an important role in the mixed crop–livestock system of tribal farming communities in Adilabad District, a high climate risk-prone region in India. Currently, the local seed system is limited to landraces and hybrids that are primarily used for domestic grain and fodder purposes. This study aimed to understand the farmers' needs and c...

Achieving global goals on sustainable nutrition, health, and wellbeing will depend on delivering enhanced diets to humankind. This will require, among others, instantaneous access to information on food quality at key points within agri-food systems. Although stationary methods are usually used to quantify grain quality (wet-lab chemistry, benchtop...

This study tested whether machine learning (ML) methods can effectively separate individual plants from complex 3D canopy laser scans as a prerequisite to analyzing particular plant features. For this, we scanned mung bean and chickpea crops with PlantEye (R) laser scanners. Firstly, we segmented the crop canopies from the background in 3D space us...

High throughput phenotyping UAV Sub-Path detection Parallel processing Sub-Plot LAI Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have exhibited its potential for efficient and non-invasive crop data acquisition in high throughput crop phenotyping. In general, for analysis of phenotypic traits, there is a need for extracting the region of interest (RoI) from ima...

The current pace of crop improvement is inadequate to feed the burgeoning human population by 2050. Higher, more stable and sustainable crop production is required against a backdrop of drought stress, which causes significant losses in crop yields. Tailoring crops for drought adaptation may hold the key to address these challenges and provide resi...

The current pace of crop improvement is inadequate to feed the burgeoning human population by 2050. Higher, more stable, and sustainable crop production is required against a backdrop of drought stress, which causes significant losses in crop yields. Tailoring crops for drought adaptation may hold the key to address these challenges and provide res...

Chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) is one of the most important grain legumes in the world, but its current and future production is threatened due to the increased incidence of drought and heat stress. To address this challenge, an integrated crop improvement strategy encompassing breeding, genomics, physiology and agronomy is required. Here, we review...

For many crops, the genomics revolution has given hope that breeding would become easier, faster, and more efficient. Relevant phenotyping is now the main bottleneck and new technologies provide opportunities for easier, faster, more sensitive, and more informative phenotyping. However, the phenotyping agenda must be driven by scientific questions...

An earlier review on transpiration efficiency (TE) reported a tight link between high TE and transpiration restriction under high vapor pressure deficit (VPD). This paper builds on it and addresses other factors altering TE (shoot biomass/water transpired), namely species difference among major C4 cereals, soil texture, and source/sink relationship...

The high degree of Genotype by Environment by Management (GxExM) interactions is a serious challenge for production and crop improvement efforts. This challenge is especially true for a crop like groundnut that is often grown as a rainfed crop in diverse environments and management, leading to considerable production fluctuations among regions and...

Efficient selection of drought-tolerant crops requires identification and high-throughput phenotyping (HTP) of the complex functional (especially canopy-conductance) traits that elicit plant responses to continually fluctuating environmental conditions. However, phenotyping of such dynamic physiology-based traits has been immensely challenging espe...

Chickpea is an important pulse crop, cultivated on about 18 Mha worldwide, and is both a critical diet component for large populations of semiarid tropical climate and one of the most beneficial crops for farming systems’ sustainable productivity. Chickpea originates from a fairly narrow centre of origin, that is, the middle East Anatolia, although...

The rapid development of phenotyping technologies over the last years gave the opportunity to study plant development over time. The treatment of the massive amount of data collected by high-throughput phenotyping (HTP) platforms is however an important challenge for the plant science community. An important issue is to accurately estimate, over ti...

This work is undertaken considering the significance of functional phenotyping (primarily measured from continuous profiles of plant-water relations) for crop selection purposes. High-Throughput Plant Phenotyping (HTPP) platforms which largely employ state-of-the-art sensor technologies for acquisition of vast amount of field data, often fail to ef...

Background Restricting transpiration under high vapor pressure deficit (VPD) is a promising water-saving trait for drought adaptation. However, it is often measured under controlled conditions and at very low throughput, unsuitable for breeding. A few high-throughput phenotyping (HTP) studies exist, and have considered only maximum transpiration ra...

• Terminal drought substantially reduces chickpea yields. Reducing water use at vegetative stage by reducing transpiration rate (TR) under high vapor pressure deficit (VPD), i.e. under dry/hot conditions, contributes to drought adaptation. We hypothesized that this trait could relate to differences in the genotype’s dependence on root’s water trans...

Pearl millet hybrids are cultivated on about 6 m ha area in India. These hybrids are cultivated primarily in better endowed environments in rainy season or under irrigated environments in summer season, which experiences high velocity winds coupled with rains around crop maturity stage, leading some of them to lodge at grain filling/maturity stage...

How unprecedented changes in climatic conditions will impact yield and productivity of some crops and their response to existing stresses, abiotic and biotic interactions is a key global concern. Climate change can also alter natural species’ abundance and distribution or favor invasive species, which in turn can modify ecosystem dynamics and the p...

LAGIRS.Latin American GRSS and ISPRS Remote Sensing Conference, Santiago, CHL, 22-/03/2020 - 26/03/2020

Groundnut production in India is primarily rainfed and yields fluctuate greatly among seasons and regions. The area of groundnut production is categorized, somewhat arbitrarily, into five zones. A modeling approach was used to define homogeneous production units (HPUs) and assess region-specific constraints and yield gaps. This approach offers a qu...

Crop improvement efforts aiming at increasing crop production (quantity, quality) and adapting to climate change have been subject of active research over the past years. But, ‘to what extent can breeding gains be achieved under a changing climate, at a pace sufficient to usefully contribute to climate adaptation, mitigation and food security?’. He...

This book chapter intends to equip the readers with the basic understanding of what crop models are, answer the common questions which the crop-modelling community usually receives from the other research disciplines, and briefly describe the frequent model misuses which many times hamper broader usage of models in agriculture. We will briefly disc...

“Stay-green” crop phenotypes have been shown to impact drought tolerance and nutritional content of several crops. We aimed to genetically describe and functionally dissect the particular stay-green phenomenon found in chickpeas with a green cotyledon color of mature dry seed and investigate its potential use for improvement of chickpea environment...

This study compared maize, sorghum and pearl-millet, leading C4 cereals, for the transpiration rate (TR) response to increasing atmospheric and soil water stress. The TR response to transiently increasing VPD (0.9–4.1 kPa) and the transpiration and leaf area expansion response to progressive soil drying were measured in controlled conditions at ear...

Water availability is a major constraint for crop production in semiarid environments. The impact of tillage practices on water potential gradient, water transfer resistance, yield, and water use efficiency (WUE g) of spring wheat was determined on the western Loess Plateau. Six tillage practices implemented in 2001 and their effects were determine...

Pearl millet is an important cereal crop capable of growing in semi-arid, arid and marginal regions of the world. Drought is a major abiotic constraint affecting pearl millet production globally. Previously identified and validated major linkage group 2 (LG2) drought tolerance (DT) QTL contributing to hybrid grain and stover yield potential to term...

The process of agricultural simulation using APSIM requires input meteorological data to be prepared in a specific format and the simulation setting file to be ready before the simulation processing starts. Because of possible time savings when conducting large number of simulations at once, it is preferable to create all the input and settings fil...

Limiting transpiration rate under high vapor pressure deficit (VPD) and/or progressive soil drying conditions are soil water conservation mechanisms that can play an important drought-adaptive role if water is limiting to support crops at its full potential. In this study, these two important physiological mechanisms were measured on parental pairs...

Limiting transpiration rate under high vapor pressure deficit (VPD) and/or progressive soil drying conditions are soil water conservation mechanisms that can play an important drought-adaptive role if water is limiting to support crops at its full potential. In this study, these two important physiological mechanisms were measured on parental pairs...

AGGRESSIVE FERTILIZER SUBSIDIES throughout South Asia have led to a rapid increase in the use of synthetic nitrogen fertilizers such as urea at the farm level. While this has been successful in increasing yields, significant yield gaps remain between potential and actual farm yields, while unbalanced or over application of fertilizers potentially d...

Plant adaptation to drought depends on both inherited and adaptive characteristic of water conservative traits. Expression of limited transpiration rate (TR) under high vapor pressure deficit (VPD) conditions could be one of the potential sources of soil water conservation for drought tolerance. Large genetic variation for limited TR has been ident...

Key message Four genetic regions associated with water use traits, measured at different levels of plant organization, and with agronomic traits were identified within a previously reported region for terminal water deficit adaptation on linkage group 2. Close linkages between these traits showed the value of phenotyping both for agronomic and seco...

Chickpea is an important livelihood option and nutritious food source for many subsistence farming communities in the developing world. Although India is the biggest chickpea producing nation, the demands of its growing population are not met by domestic production. This study uses a modelling approach to quantify the region-specific constraints an...

Genotypic differences in transpiration rate responses to high vapour pressure deficit (VPD) was earlier reported. Here we tested the hypothesis that this limitation could relate to different degrees of dependence on the apoplastic (spaces between cells), and symplastic water transport pathways (through cells via aquaporin-facilitated transport), wh...

Domesticated species are impacted in unintended ways during domestication and breeding. Changes in the nature and intensity of selection impart genetic drift, reduce diversity and increase the frequency of deleterious alleles. Such outcomes constrain our ability to expand the cultivation of crops into environments that differ from those under which...