Climate-ready rice: adaptive traits and management practices for resilient rice-based systems (Part-1): Preface

Abstract

Rice in less favorable areas is challenged by numerous abiotic stresses including drought, salinity, floods, low soil nutrient availability, metal toxicity, and temperature extremes. Improved varieties should essentially incorporate tolerances of prevailing stresses and withstand the worsening conditions caused by climate change adversities. Reports summarizing advancements made over the past few decades in developing stress tolerant varieties that abate production losses under these conditions were presented at the International Rice Congress (IRC2014), held in Bangkok, Thailand, during October 27–31, 2014. The congress brought together over 1400 rice scientists from 68 countries. This special issue is the first of two sets of reports presented at the IRC2014. Some of these reports were presented under the title adaptive traits for better resilience and provide examples of recent developments in packaging abiotic stress tolerance traits into high yielding varieties and their delivery to farmers in target areas. In most cases, stress tolerant varieties need to be managed differently to optimize their performance in farmers’ fields. Certain management practices that work in favorable intensive systems could either have similar effects, no effect, or even undesirable effects in less favorable environments. Therefore the concept of augmenting tolerance with best practices is presented to highlight the importance of proper management specific to a particular stress tolerant variety, in order to maximize the potential of these varieties in farmers’ fields. The articles included in this issue also provide some examples for field application