Harnessing the power of poplar tree natural genetic variation for the development of future sustainable biofuels and bioproducts: a droughted marginal-land experiment for multi-disciplinary investigations

The emerging bioeconomy offers significant potential to replace fossil-fuel-based energy, manufacturing, and processing with that utilizing biomass as the raw feedstock. However, feedstock production from non-food crops such as fast-growing trees, must be delivered at scale, in a reliable and consistent manner, utilizing marginal land unsuitable for food crops and with minimum inputs. This new generation of feedstock crops has a limited history of domestication. Foundational knowledge is required to enable rapid selection and breeding for improved cultivars and varieties to enable large-scale planting of 600M ha, globally over the coming decades. Here, we describe an innovative field platform with over 1,000 unique genotypes of fast-growing poplar (Populus trichocarpa) trees, each sequenced and being subjected to a controlled drought. The 6.5 ha site provides opportunities to bring together multi-disciplinary phenotyping science linked to computational, and AI approaches, enabling the link between complex plant traits and their underlying genes to be rapidly established and translated into the development of improved climate-resilient germplasm for a future at-scale bioeconomy.