Data-driven agriculture and sustainable farming: friends or foes?

Sustainability in our food and fiber agriculture systems is inherently knowledge intensive. It is more likely to be achieved by using all the knowledge, technology, and resources available, including data-driven agricultural technology and precision agriculture methods, than by relying entirely on human powers of observation, analysis, and memory following practical experience. Data collected by sensors and digested by artificial intelligence (AI) can help farmers learn about synergies between the domains of natural systems that are key to simultaneously achieve sustainability and food security. In the quest for agricultural sustainability, some high-payoff research areas are suggested to resolve critical legal and technical barriers as well as economic and social constraints. These include: the development of holistic decision-making systems, automated animal intake measurement, low-cost environmental sensors, robot obstacle avoidance, integrating remote sensing with crop and pasture models, extension methods for data-driven agriculture, methods for exploiting naturally occurring Genotype x Environment x Management experiments, innovation in business models for data sharing and data regulation reinforcing trust. Public funding for research is needed in several critical areas identified in this paper to enable sustainable agriculture and innovation

Diving into the vertical dimension of elasmobranch movement ecology

Knowledge of the three-dimensional movement patterns of elasmobranchs is vital to understand their ecological roles and exposure to anthropogenic pressures. To date, comparative studies among species at global scales have mostly focused on horizontal movements. Our study addresses the knowledge gap of vertical movements by compiling the first global synthesis of vertical habitat use by elasmobranchs from data obtained by deployment of 989 biotelemetry tags on 38 elasmobranch species. Elasmobranchs displayed high intra- and interspecific variability in vertical movement patterns. Substantial vertical overlap was observed for many epipelagic elasmobranchs, indicating an increased likelihood to display spatial overlap, biologically interact, and share similar risk to anthropogenic threats that vary on a vertical gradient. We highlight the critical next steps toward incorporating vertical movement into global management and monitoring strategies for elasmobranchs, emphasizing the need to address geographic and taxonomic biases in deployments and to concurrently consider both horizontal and vertical movements

Mapping quantitative trait loci in chickpea associated with time to flowering and resistance to Didymella rabiei the causal agent of Ascochyta blight

Drought is the major constraint to chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.) productivity worldwide. Utilizing early-flowering genotypes and advancing sowing from spring to autumn have been suggested as strategies for drought avoidance. However, Ascochyta blight (causal agent: Didymella rabiei (Kov.) v. Arx.) is a major limitation for chickpea winter cultivation. Most efforts to introgress resistance to the pathogen into Kabuli germplasm resulted in relatively late flowering germplasm. With the aim to explore the feasibility of combining earliness and resistance, RILs derived from a cross between a Kabuli cultivar and a Desi accession were evaluated under field conditions and genotyped with SSR markers. Three quantitative trait loci (QTLs) with significant effects on resistance were identified: two linked loci located on LG4 in epistatic interaction and a third locus on LG8. Two QTLs were detected for time to flowering: one in LG1 and another on LG2. When resistance and time to flowering were analyzed together, the significance of the resistance estimates obtained for the LG8 locus increased and the locus effect on days to flowering, previously undetected, was significantly different from zero. The identification of a locus linked both to resistance and time to flowering may account for the correlation observed between these traits in this and other breeding attempts