Agriculture and crop science in China: Innovation and sustainability

Abstract

The International Crop Science Congress (ICSC) is a regularly held event allowing crop scientists from around the world to integrate current knowledge into a global context and international applications. The 7th ICSC was held August 14–19, 2016 in Beijing, China, with the theme “Crop Science: Innovation and Sustainability”. The congress included eight thematic areas: crop germplasm and evolution, crop genetics and genomics, crop biotechnology, breeding and seed production, agronomy and crop physiology, climate change and sustainability, crop quality and processing, and crop production and socioeconomic aspects. As a companion production for this great congress, the nine papers collected in this special issue feature important fields of crop science in China. This editorial first briefly introduces the 7th ICSC, followed by a brief discussion of the current status of, constraints to, and innovations in Chinese agriculture and crop science. Finally, the main scientific points of the papers published in this special issue are surveyed, covering important advances in hybrid rice breeding, minor cereals, food legumes, rapeseed, crop systems, crop management, cotton, genomics-based germplasm research, and QTL mapping. In a section describing future prospects, it is indicated that China faces a full transition from traditional to modern agriculture and crop science.