Earliness and Resilience for Yield in a Changed Climate (ERYCC)

ERYCC stands for Earliness and Resilience for Yield in a Changed Climate, a Sustainable Arable LINK project LK0992 sponsored by Defra, under the title 'Adapting Wheat to Global Warming'.  Consortium members are British Wheat Breeders (RAGT Seeds, CPB-Twyford, and Nickerson), HGCA, BASF, Masstock, ADAS, the University of Nottingham, and the New Zealand Institute for Crop & Food Research.

ERYCC is addressing the threat of global warming to UK wheat production. The consortium are typing wheat germplasm for sources of earliness and other yield resilience traits.  They are then creating three publicly available mapping populations to enable tests (in subsequent research) of how these traits can best be combined through future plant breeding.  Yield-determining traits are being identified in current varieties and inter-related quantitatively, to indicate to breeders and the industry how to adapt UK wheat.