Dr Tao Luo1, Dr Heping Zhang1
1CSIRO, 147 Underwood Avenue, Floreat, Australia
Biography:
As a postdoctoral fellow at CSIRO’s Agriculture & Food division, my focus lies in modelling surface soil water and temperature dynamics and their influence on crop establishment, particularly for wheat and canola. My expertise extends to crop cultivation, farming systems, and plant phenotyping through computer vision techniques.
Abstract:
The Mediterranean climate in Western Australia exposes canola to terminal drought during the critical flowering and grain-filling phases, leading to intense competition for resources between flowering and pod development. A comprehensive field experiment was undertaken to examine the temporal and spatial distribution of flower and pod numbers across various canola genotypes under terminal drought conditions. Our findings revealed that the pod-to-flower ratio varied from 30% to 44% among the four genotypes studied. The flowering period of the canola genotypes extended over 5-6 weeks, with the majority of seed yield derived from flowers that bloomed three weeks after the initial flowering. These results support the hypothesis that modifying the growth habit of rapeseed to achieve a more uniform and abbreviated flowering period could enhance resource allocation to pod development, providing a potential strategy to mitigate the impacts of terminal drought stress in Western Australia.