About

Our Mission

Plants are the foundation of most of Earth’s ecosystems. They provide the air we breathe and the food we eat. They contribute to water conservation and sequester carbon in the soil. They provide shade that cools urban and suburban neighborhoods.

As climate change reshapes the world in which we live, human health, food security, infrastructure, and wild ecosystems are all under threat. Increased plant adaptability and resilience is key to the health of our natural systems.

Climate-proofing crops and wild ecosystems requires resilient plants that will thrive in a changing world, and climate-friendly agricultural practices that mitigate rather than exacerbate the worst effects of climate change.

Plant ARC will leverage fundamental research to advance plant adaptability and resilience.

Improving resilience and food security requires a research-driven approach to tackle three major challenges. We envision research-driven scalable solutions that can be implemented close to home—in urban farms and community gardens in Philadelphia—and across the globe.

• Warming temperatures, shifting seasons, and unpredictable precipitation alter plant germination, growth, flowering, and seed development in complex and interconnected ways. Resolving the threat to global agriculture will require a deep understanding of how climate change will alter plant physiology, growth, and development.
• We need to develop plants that are adaptable and resilient in the face of frequent abiotic stresses.
• Climate change is disrupting entire ecosystems, including the microbes and pollinators that plants rely on to grow and reproduce. Long-lasting resilience to climate change requires strategies to safeguard these crucial species interactions from the worst effects of a changing climate.

Our Partners

With its diverse and synergistic strengths in plant and biological research, the School of Arts and Sciences Department of Biology is a lynchpin for Plant ARC.  

Research in the plant group at Penn touches on many areas, including including improving plant architecture and yield and enhancing plant adaptability and resilience to changing climates (Wagner lab), the identification of the mechanisms by which plants survive stress at a variety of operative scales including RNA (Gregory lab), plant-microbe interaction (Wood lab) and whole-plant-to-ecosystem level physiology (Helliker lab). 

Beyond Penn, Plant ARC is working with Iowa State University on translation of our research findings into maize, with the University of Delaware on controlled environment agriculture and field trials, with NC State on data science, and with the University of Arizona and Cornell University on field drought tests for sorghum.