The 2nd NordPlant annual day was originally planned to be held in
Tromsø. However, the covid-19 pandemic forced us to change our plans and arrange an online meting instead. Happily, this worked quite well, and we were able to arrange a meeting with 75 registered participants.
The theme of the meeting was “Plant phenotyping and modelling for improved resilience and maintained quality in a changing climate” and the speakers addressed this topic in a number of interesting presentations over two days.
On 5 November, Erik Alexandersson opened the meeting with a welcoming address. Timo Hytönen from the University of Helsinki then held the first keynote lecture, on the history and convergent adaptive evolution of northern woodland strawberry populations. The first session then continued with talks by Johan Stenberg from SLU, Morten Lillemo from NMBU and Klara Panzarova from PSI.
We then arranged an on-line poster session. This was a first for all the participants, but in spite of the unfamiliar situation we managed to display ten posters with quite active discussions around many of the posters.
Following the poster session, Kaisa Nieminen from Luke gave a presentation on the genetics of tree architecture. After this three NordPlant-funded participants presented. First out were Jesper Cairo Westergaard from UCPH and Tatu Polvinen from UHEL who presented the work that has been done within NordPlant on common data standards. This presentation was recorded, and is available here. Finally, Chandana Pandey from UCPH presented her work on P. teres infection of barley.
The second day was focused on climate and modeling. Annette Menzel from TUM gave a keynote presentation on plant phenology and climate change, where she described her work on ecological responses to climate change in general and the impact on growing seasons in particular. The three last presentations were made by NordPlant associated speakers. Anna-Maria Jönsson from LU and Prianka Trivedi from University of Oulu presented their research, while Katriina Mouhu presented the NaPPI facility and described the process of conducting an experiment there. This presentation was part of NordPlant’s “Facility managers’ forum”-initiative and is described in more detail here.
In spite of the move to an online venue necessitated by the covid-19 pandemic, we feel that it was an interesting and rewarding meeting, and are very grateful to all who contributed.