Catalan scientists look for new rice varieties to fight the apple snail and climate change effects on this crop
The increase of salinity due to climate change effects is threatening rice crops in Europe. The European project NEURICE (New Commercial European Rice), coordinated by the University of Barcelona and with the participation of IRTA and CRAG, the Catalan cooperative Càmara Arrossera del Montsià (Montsià Rice Chamber) and the Catalan engineering company IRIS, among other collaborators, want to get new varieties of salt-tolerant rice. This property would allow adapting European rice to the conditions imposed by the climate change without losing productivity. Moreover, they would be useful to fight the apple snail (Pomacea maculate), a plague that threatens the crops and has been removed only by flooding rice crops with sea water.
The increase of salinity due to climate change effects is threatening rice crops in Europe. The European project NEURICE (New Commercial European Rice), coordinated by the University of Barcelona and with the participation of IRTA and CRAG, the Catalan cooperative Càmara Arrossera del Montsià (Montsià Rice Chamber) and the Catalan engineering company IRIS, among other collaborators, want to get new varieties of salt-tolerant rice. This property would allow adapting European rice to the conditions imposed by the climate change without losing productivity. Moreover, they would be useful to fight the apple snail (Pomacea maculate), a plague that threatens the crops and has been removed only by flooding rice crops with sea water.
Climate change is threatening rice crops
Rice production in Europe, which covers two thirds of the consumed rice in the continent, is now threatened by the effects of the climate change, like in many other crops.
In the Mediterranean basins, climate change causes temperatures to rise and also periods of drought which are more frequent and hard so they damage water quality and river flows. These effects increase the salinity of the soil which affects negatively the crop production. Climate change also causes sea level to rise, and increases the salinity in coastal areas, deltas and river mouths where there are rice crops. “Rice is one of the most salinity-sensitive crops, therefore, if we donʼt act, rice and its sector in the Mediterranean area will disappear in some years”, said Salvador Nogués, lecturer from the Department of Evolutionary Biology, Ecology and Environmental Sciences at the Faculty of Biology of the University of Barcelona and coordinator of the project.
The project aims to get varieties of rice which are salinity-tolerant and adapted to these areas that allow cultivating rice without losing its productivity and maintaining the positive impact that derives to an environmental, landscape and socio-economic level.
The apple snail and Ebro Delta
In Catalonia, the Ebro Delta is highly threatened from some years ago by a new invasive species with dramatic effects on rice crops: the apple snail (Pomacea maculate). The high reproductive capacity and absence of predators of this species made its spread in Ebro Delta impossible to stop and the damage in crops got worse every time. “It is a big and urgent problem, because if we do not stop the apple snail in the Ebro Delta, it will get to other rice areas in Spain and Europe” says Salvador Nogués.
One of the few strategies that could stop the presence of apple snails was to flood the crops with sea water, since the snails donʼt tolerate high salinity. Unfortunately, the waste salinity after the sea water treatment causes losses on crops that reached up to a 30% of production on worst cases.
Simultaneously, they are considering sowing rice ashore to avoid damage caused by apple snails, which mostly happens at the beginning of the cultivation, but it has been proved that using this technique in Ebro Delta needs varieties which are salinity-tolerant because otherwise the seed would die due to salt excess.
Therefore, in Catalonia, the project NEURICE wants to offer a solution not only to adapt rice varieties to climate change but also to enable fighting the apple snail plague.
Adding salinity-tolerance from tropical varieties
In Asia there are tropical rice varieties that are highly tolerant to salinity but they canʼt be cultivated in Mediterranean climates and are not a commercial option. It has been discovered that salinity-tolerance from these tropical varieties in Asia is due the presence of a small chromosome segment called Saltol. In order to add this salinity-tolerance on European commercial varieties, they will use non-transgenic plant-improvement traditional techniques. “It is about hybridizing with classic crossing techniques that are salinity-resistant with local varieties, from each one of the participant countries in the project, until reaching adapted varieties to each area, but highly salinity-tolerant”, says Xavier Serrat, researcher of the UB who participates in the project. “An expert can spend up to 12 years to get a new commercial rice variety, we intend getting a minimum of 12 European varieties that are salinity-resistance in the 4 years of this project”, continued Xavier Serrat.
Salinity-tolerant varieties, will they be as good as the current ones?
Studying new varieties behaviour is one of the most important tasks in this project. The first tests will be done on hydroponic crops, in an environment that allows assessing the salinity-tolerance degree of the new varieties in a controlled, effective and fast way compared to the other conditions.
Once the most salinity-tolerant lines are identified, the rice crops will be testes during two years in the deltas in Ebro (Spain), Po (Italy) and Rhine (France) from 2018 on. These varieties will be cultivated to compare the agronomic behaviour and production.
Salinity-tolerant variants that pass the field tests will be registered and commercialized so that rice producers in these areas can continue cultivating rice in high salinity areas.
Les varietats tolerants a la salinitat que superin els assajos de camp seran registrades i comercialitzades per a que els productors dʼarròs dʼaquestes zones puguin continuar cultivant arròs en zones amb salinitat elevada.
About Neurice project
NEURICE project is financed by the program Horizon 2020, through the call “Sustainable Food Security”. This four year project (2016-2020) aims to find new lines that allow productivity, stability and production quality of European rice.
The project promotes collaborative research among experts of the following fields: biotechnology, plant physiology, agronomic development, electrophysiology and cell signaling and control systems of salinity.