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To meet the increasing global demand for food, feed, fibre and other plant-derived products, a steep increase in crop productivity is a scientifically and technically challenging imperative. The CropBooster-P project, a response to the H2020 call ‘Future proofing our plants’, is developing a roadmap for plant research to improve crops critical for the future of European agriculture by increasing crop yield, nutritional quality, value for non-food applications and sustainability. However, if we want to efficiently improve crop production in Europe and prioritize methods for crop trait improvement in the coming years, we need to take into account future socio-economic, technological and global developments, including numerous policy and socio-economic challenges and constraints. Based on a wide range of possible global trends and key uncertainties, we developed four extreme future learning scenarios that depict complementary future developments. Here, we elaborate on how the scenarios could inform and direct future plant research, and we aim to highlight the crop improvement approaches that could be the most promising or appropriate within each of these four future world scenarios. Moreover, we discuss some key plant technology options that would need to be developed further to meet the needs of multiple future learning scenarios, such as improving methods for breeding and genetic engineering. In addition, other diverse platforms of food production may offer unrealized potential, such as underutilized terrestrial and aquatic species as alternative sources of nutrition and biomass production. We demonstrate that although several methods or traits could facilitate a more efficient crop production system in some of the scenarios, others may offer great potential in all four of the future learning scenarios. Altogether, this indicates that depending on which future we are heading toward, distinct plant research fields should be given priority if we are to meet our food

The growing world population and global increases in the standard of living both result in an increasing demand for food, feed and other plant-derived products. In the coming years, plant-based research will be among the major drivers ensuring food security and the expansion of the bio-based economy. Crop productivity is determined by several factors, including the available physical and agricultural resources, crop management, and the resource use efficiency, quality and intrinsic yield potential of the chosen crop. This review focuses on intrinsic yield potential, since understanding its determinants and their biological basis will allow to maximize the plant's potential in food and energy production. Yield potential is determined by a variety of complex traits that integrate strictly regulated processes and their underlying gene regulatory networks. Due to this inherent complexity, numerous potential targets have been identified that could be exploited to increase crop yield. These encompass diverse metabolic and physical processes at the cellular, organ and canopy level. We present an overview of some of the distinct biological processes considered to be crucial for yield determination that could further be exploited to improve future crop productivity.

The world needs more than double its current agricultural productivity by 2050 to produce enough food and feed, as well as to provide feedstock for the bioeconomy. These future increases will not only need to be sustainable but also need to compromise the nutritional quality, and ideally also need to decrease greenhouse gas emissions and increase carbon sequestration to help mitigate the consequences of global climate change. These challenges could be tackled by developing and integrating new future-proof crops into our food system. The H2020 CropBooster-P project sets out plant-centered breeding approaches guided by a broad socio-economic and societal support. First, the potential approaches for breeding crops with sustainably increased yields adapted to the future climate of Europe are identified. These crop-breeding options are subsequently prioritized and their adoption considered by experts across the agri-food system and the wider public, taking into account environmental, economic and other technical criteria. In this way, a specific research agenda to future-proof our crops was developed, supported by an eventual implementation plan.

The growing world population and global increases in the standard of living both result in an increasing demand for food, feed and other plant-derived products. In the coming years, plant-based research will be among the major drivers ensuring food security and the expansion of the bio-based economy. Crop productivity is determined by several factors, including the available physical and agricultural resources, crop management, and the resource use efficiency, quality and intrinsic yield potential of the chosen crop. This review focuses on intrinsic yield potential, since understanding its determinants and their biological basis will allow to maximize the plant's potential in food and energy production. Yield potential is determined by a variety of complex traits that integrate strictly regulated processes and their underlying gene regulatory networks. Due to this inherent complexity, numerous potential targets have been identified that could be exploited to increase crop yield. These encompass diverse metabolic and physical processes at the cellular, organ and canopy level. We present an overview of some of the distinct biological processes considered to be crucial for yield determination that could further be exploited to improve future crop productivity.

Plant scientists and farmers are facing major challenges in providing food and nutritional security for a growing population, while preserving natural resources and biodiversity. Moreover, this should be done while adapting agriculture to climate change and by reducing its carbon footprint. To address these challenges, there is an urgent need to breed crops that are more resilient to suboptimal environments. Huge progress has recently been made in understanding the physiological, genetic and molecular bases of plant nutrition and environmental responses, paving the way towards a more sustainable agriculture. In this review, we present an overview of these progresses and strategies that could be developed to increase plant nutrient use efficiency and tolerance to abiotic stresses. As illustrated by many examples, they already led to promising achievements and crop improvements. Here, we focus on nitrogen and phosphate uptake and use efficiency and on adaptation to drought, salinity and heat stress. These examples first show the necessity of deepening our physiological and molecular understanding of plant environmental responses. In particular, more attention should be paid to investigate stress combinations and stress recovery and acclimation that have been largely neglected to date. It will be necessary to extend these approaches from model plants to crops, to unravel the relevant molecular targets of biotechnological or genetic strategies directly in these species. Similarly, sustained efforts should be done for further exploring the genetic resources available in these species, as well as in wild species adapted to unfavourable environments. Finally, technological developments will be required to breed crops that are more resilient and efficient. This especially relates to the development of multiscale phenotyping under field conditions and a wide range of environments, and use of modelling and big data management to handle the huge amount of information provided