Innovation Research Project
Project Leader
Mitsuru TSUBO, Professor, Arid Land Research Center
Project Organization
Sustainable Land Management Group
Leader: Nigussie Haregeweyn AYEHU, Specially Appointed Professor, IPDRE
Creating Stress Tolerant Crops Group
Leader: Hisashi TSUJIMOTO, Professor, Arid Land Research Center
Drought Risk Management Group
Leader: Mitsuru TSUBO, Professor, Arid Land Research Center
Digital Technologies for Combating Salinization Group
Leader: Haruyuki FUJIMAKI, Professor, Arid Land Research Center
Project Introduction
Creating innovations for social implementation of research results in drylands
1. Sustainable land management
The Upper Blue Nile Basin in Ethiopia is one of the global hotspots where land degradation through erosion and climate change are impacting impoverished rural livelihoods. The Sustainable Land Management (SLM) Group is aiming to widely disseminate evidence-based and integrated SLM techniques (physical, biological, and agronomic) and approaches. We will use the research results of the IPDRE Soil Erosion Research Group during the Third Medium-term Objectives Period as a basis for selecting an integrated method and validating SLM on individual farms and community lands. We will use a recently signed partnership agreement to conduct interdisciplinary research to ensure that the entire process, from research planning to post-assessment, reflects the views of various stakeholders including farmers. Furthermore, we will develop and propose an integrated watershed management guideline.
2. Creation of stress-tolerant crops
The Creating Stress Tolerant Crops Group is conducting research to contribute to the nutrition for people living in drylands by breeding traits of tolerance to dry conditions and high temperatures to important plants such as wheat, millet, and cowpeas. To achieve this goal, we will bring together wisdom from the fields of genetics, molecular biology, plant physiology, biochemistry, and plant pathology to explore global plant genetic resources, understand various traits, develop efficient hybrid production methods, simple genome editing methods, and identify novel genes and compounds involved in stress tolerance. This will expand the diversity of crops, create novel mutations, and accelerate the development of stress tolerant crops using new compounds as selection markers. Additionally, we will build a strong joint research system with researchers in Africa and Asia to explore and evaluate genetic resources. The crops and technologies developed by our group will be assessed by tests conducted under actual stresses in dry land fields with the aim of developing practical crop varieties. Furthermore, we will establish strong joint research systems with local researchers, spread novel crops and technologies, and build a foundation for people living in drylands so that they can live rich and sustainable lives even in this era of climate crisis.
3. Drought Risk Management
The Drought Risk Management Group is conducting research to commercialize a farmer support smartphone app that began development in 2020. This smartphone app provides cropping information such as the optimal sowing time, seeding amount, and fertilization amount based on seasonal forecasts and yield predictions from a crop simulation model. Various African countries that are exposed to drought risk have large annual fluctuations in crop yields and require detailed agrometeorological information for farmers to cope with drought. We expect that the risk of agricultural drought will be reduced by disseminating this smartphone app to farmers in African countries. Furthermore, to disseminate information to society, a website will be created to publicize information on the outlook of the impact of agricultural droughts. We expect that by providing agricultural drought information through the website, it will be possible to grasp the crop situation and judge whether market prices are appropriate.
4. Digital Technologies for Combating Salinization
We are developing a salinity control method for irrigation-induced salt accumulation that replaces the FAO guidelines, which have unclear theoretical and experimental grounds, by proposing a method that uses the salt transport simulation model WASH_2D in soil in order to determine the optimum desalination water volume. The effectiveness of the new method will be verified by field experiments. As another improvement measure, we are using soil moisture and salinity sensors and low-cost controllers such as Raspberry Pi zero, Arduino, and M5Stack to develop a method for automatically conducting leaching with an amount of water upon reaching a critical salt concentration that has a large impact on yield. The effectiveness of the method will also be verified. In FY2022, we are conducting effect verification experiments in the experimental field at the Arid Land Research Center and in the experimental field at the International Innovation Center for Aral Sea Basin. In the future, we are planning to conduct demonstration experiments at experimental fields of other collaborating research institutions or pilot farmers (each cultivation area is about 1000 m2, as well as to hold workshops inviting improvement extension workers, advanced farmers, and researchers at agricultural experimental stations.
