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The European infrastructures EMPHASIS and AnaEE aim to collaborate in bringing innovative solutions for a sustainable intensification of agriculture. By integrating the study of plant phenomics and agricultural ecology they hope to foster the development of novel scientific concepts, sensors and integrated models.

Plant research produces data in a profusion of types and scales, and in ever-increasing volume. What are the challenges and opportunities presented by data management in contemporary plant science? And how can researchers make efficient and fruitful use of data management tools and strategies?

The biodiversity of food plants is vital for humanity's capacity to meet sustainability challenges. This goal requires the rigorous integration of plant, environmental, social and health sciences. It is coalescing around four thematic cornerstones that are both interdisciplinary and policy relevant.

In 1916, Swedish geologist Ernst Jakob Lennart von Post delivered a provocative lecture in Oslo, Norway, advocating the use of pollen grains in bog sediments as indicators of past vegetation and climate. The lecture spawned many applications and represents a landmark in multidisciplinary science.

Global demand for coffee is constantly rising while the security of its production is increasingly threatened by disease and a changing climate. Is the genetic diversity of coffee in Ethiopia, its site of origin, robust enough to provide solutions to these challenges?

Prolonged and intensive breeding of wheat has produced varieties that would be unrecognizable to our ancestors. Such artificial selection can risk prioritizing traits of value to producers over those of importance to consumers. So is there evidence that crop improvement has left modern wheat nutritionally impoverished?

Climate change will pose diverse challenges for pollination this century. Identifying and addressing these challenges will help to mitigate impacts, and avoid a scenario whereby plants and pollinators are in the ‘wrong place at the wrong time’.

The need for GM crops is growing rapidly as a consequence of the overriding priority for the sustainable generation of vastly increased food production. Although demands for energy and raw materials from the bioeconomy remain, they may become eclipsed by the quest for more food.

Transgenic biotechnology offers great opportunities for food security. But the potential effects on human health and the environment are a major concern to the public, which hinders the application of the technology. Along with continually implementing rigid biosafety assessment, educating the public is critical for promoting transgenic crops in China.

Boosted by next-generation sequencing technology, there is now an ever-growing list of fully sequenced plant genomes. Recent additions to this list are two presumed ancestors of Petunia hybrida, the most popular bedding plant worldwide. These genome sequences provide new information on a species at a key position in plant phylogeny, and support the use of petunia as a research model plant species.

Sustainable intensification is a concept of growing importance, yet it is in danger of becoming scientifically obsolete because of the diversity of meanings it has acquired. To avoid this, it is important to consider the various scales on which it can aid progress towards feeding human populations while also protecting the environment.

The world's ecosystems are losing biodiversity fast. A satellite mission designed to track changes in plant functional diversity around the globe could deepen our understanding of the pace and consequences of this change, and how to manage it.

Agriculture is often viewed as a source of problems needing innovative solutions. But agriculture can actually be a source of innovations for the bioeconomy, if researchers embrace the cultural changes needed.

Plant science has an important part to play in meeting the global food security challenge. But, advances will be most effective if better coupled with agronomic science and the broader food security agenda.

In October 1865, Julius Sachs published a monograph entitled Experimental Physiology of Plants, and so initiated a new, quantitative branch of basic and applied botany. In our current post-genomic era the legacy of Sachs is re-emerging as a key discipline of the botanical sciences.

The tremendous gains in crop yields seen over the twentieth century were underpinned by fertilizer use and manipulation of the aboveground parts of the plant. To meet the food demands of the twenty-first century, plant scientists must turn their attention belowground.

Raising the water productivity of crops, such that they yield more with less water, is one route to raising food production over the coming century. To achieve this goal, breeders must look beyond the conservative strategies that plants employ to cope with drought in the wild.

The newly launched Diversity Seek initiative emphasizes the importance of state-of-the-art phenotypic and genotypic information. But to achieve its aims, it will also need to encourage the management of historical data, such as the metadata on the germplasm collections themselves.

Consistent with their historical focus on the functional utility of plants, botanical gardens have an important opportunity to help ensure global food and ecosystem security by expanding their living collections, research and education programmes to emphasize agriculture and its impacts.

Arabidopsis has provided significant insights into the molecular workings of plants. Agriculturally aligned model grasses can be used to bridge the gap between this basic understanding of plant biology and real world challenges.