When it comes to growing and producing food, a stable environment is always ideal. However, as climate change makes it more common to experience four seasons in one day, extreme weather events like drought, bushfires and floods can sometimes be difficult to predict.
To help Australia’s food producers be more resilient, UNE PhD student Dominic Waters is undertaking a project to discover how to make our plants and animals more robust when it comes to climate variability.
“Livestock and plants have to cope with a lot of environmental variation from one year to the next – from severe droughts to high rainfall and everything in between,” says Dominic.
“We could reduce the impact of this uncertainty by selecting robust animals and plants that perform well across these conditions.”
To do this, Dominic is studying groups of sheep across Australia that have been raised in different environments, and comparing their performance to try and determine what DNA characteristics we should be looking for when breeding animals.
“To figure out the robustness of an animal, we need to raise relatives of that animal in different environments,” he says.
“Since relatives share a large amount of the same genetics, we can use statistical tools to see how consistent their genetic effect is across the environments.
“This gives us a score, otherwise known as the breeding value, which we can use to rank the animals on their robustness.
“The more consistent, the better the score (breeding value).”
We don’t have to cast our minds back too far to be reminded of how environmental variability can affect some plants and animals, so we need to make sure that what we’re breeding can cope with this.
An important project for the future of food production, Dominic’s work was recently recognised on an international stage after he was awarded ‘Best Student Presentation' at the annual Association of Animal Breeding and Genetics Conference.
He hopes to continue working in this space, and help drive the industry in a more sustainable and efficient direction.
“We need to improve efficiency in food production to keep up with a growing population,” he says.
“We don’t have to cast our minds back too far to be reminded of how environmental variability can affect some plants and animals, so we need to make sure that what we’re breeding can cope with this."
Dominic is half way through his PhD, and will now begin to explore how his work can be applied to the horticultural industry.
“I’m collaborating with plant breeding company Intergrain and Lee Hickey at the University of Queensland to analyse robustness in a barley population,” he says.
“I’m hoping to apply some of the work I have used in sheep and also learn from the plant breeding world.”
