2022 Salt and Water Stress in Plants GRC and GRS

The greatest challenge to human society in the next 50-years will be to develop a fully sustainable society. Above and beyond urban or industrial use, agriculture is the largest consumer of land and water. How can plant biology address these existential problems?

One has only to look back, a little over 50-years, to see that the coincidence of changes in farm management practices and plant breeding led to the Green Revolution. Through simple changes in plant architecture, farmers were better able to take advantage of past innovations in the production of synthetic fertilizers. These changes are thought to have saved over a billion lives and reduced the rate of deforestation.

The next Green Revolution will require innovations that go beyond these simple solutions. Increasing yields in an ecologically conscientious manner will involve interdisciplinary teams including basic scientists, breeders, synthetic biologists, and agronomists. The goal of the Gordon Research Conference on Salt and Water Stress in Plants is to foster sharing of the latest research in these areas and provide fertile grounds to spawn the next game-changing innovations in plant science that will make a “green”-Green Revolution possible.

The 2022 Gordon Research Conference (GRC) on Salt and Water Stress in Plants will bring together researchers endeavoring to discover the mechanistic basis of stress tolerance in plants at different scales of organization. The program represents an acknowledgement of the holistic nature of plant-environmental interactions and the need to integrate research topics that span molecular, cellular, developmental, ecological and global scales.

The program will focus on salinity and other water-associated stresses, and will now also include pioneering work that examines the interface between these stresses and the biotic realm. Presentations will highlight the power of model systems, tackle evolutionary questions spanning species boundaries, and examine the nexus between basic and applied research using globally relevant crops.

Through this interdisciplinary forum, we hope to pool together researchers that are answering the most compelling scientific questions with the broadest impact. The bulk of the GRC will comprise 20-minute presentations of unpublished research and 10-minute discussion periods. Although the core of the program is established, nearly half of the talks will be selected from submitted abstracts to air the most recent discoveries and provide opportunities for younger and rising trainees.

The program includes poster sessions and free time to enhance idea exchange and networking. The GRS pre-meeting is organized by trainees and focused on multi-disciplinary research topics that explore plant diversity, genomics, integrative physiology and field-relevant research. The conference will support broader participation through targeted travel awards to graduate students and postdoctoral fellows interested in pursuing plant research.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.