Dr Corinne Celestina1, Prof. James Hunt1, Hamish Brown2, Neil Huth3, Mariana Andreucci4, Dr Zvi Hochman1, Dr Maxwell Bloomfield5, Dr Kenton Porker3, Melissa McCallum6, Dr Felicity Harris7, Dr Ben Biddulph8, Ghazwan Al Yaseri8, Dion Nicol8, Dr Ben Trevaskis3, Dr Jessica Hyles3, Dr Enli Wang3, Dr Zhigan Zhao9, Dr Bangyou Zheng3, Michelle Kohout10
1University Of Melbourne, Australia, 2The New Zealand Institute for Plant and Food Research, New Zealand, 3CSIRO Agriculture and Food, Australia, 4Lincoln University, New Zealand, 5La Trobe University, Australia, 6South Australia Research and Development Institute, Australia, 7Charles Sturt University, Australia, 8Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development Western Australia, Australia, 9China Agricultural University, China, 10Nature Illustrations, Australia
Biography:
Dr Celestina is a Research Fellow in the Crop Agronomy Group at the University of Melbourne. She currently works on several projects funded by the Australian grains industry, including the GRDC National Risk Management Initiative, Long Coleoptile Wheat project, and National Phenology Initiative. Prior to joining the University of Melbourne, she worked at La Trobe University and Southern Farming Systems. In 2021 she was awarded a Young Agronomist Award from the Australian Society of Agronomy.
Abstract:
Accurate assessment and description of plant development is critical for agronomic management, scientific research and crop breeding applications. The scheduling of inputs, comparison of varieties, validation of simulation modelling and so on all depend on the ability to reliably determine the timing of development stages or duration of phases in a crop’s life cycle. However, the widely used decimal code for growth stages is not without its limitations.
Here we present new scales of development for wheat and barley. These scales and the accompanying measurement protocols were developed and tested as part of the GRDC National Phenology Initiative. This Initiative parameterised and validated an improved cereal phenology model in APSIM-NG using a panel of 96 wheat and barley cultivars grown in controlled environments and in the field at geographically and climatically diverse sites. Compared to the existing decimal code, these new scales describe development in unambiguous, objective and quantitative terms; they distinguish between plant- and crop-level development; they merge and fill gaps within existing scales; and they are compatible with modern analytical technologies.
We also demonstrate how these new development scales have been applied to the classification of wheat and barley phenology. Observations of development were collected from field experiments carried out at 15 sites across Australia between 2017 and 2020. From this dataset we derived a scheme to classify cultivar phenology based on relative thermal time to anthesis. This application demonstrates the utility of the new development scales and highlights their potential to facilitate ongoing advances in agronomy.