M1 internship of Marie Foyot

Internship summary : Climate change is causing a decline in agricultural productivity. However, the growing population requires to find ways to produce enough to meet the growing food demand. These paradoxical problems require the implementation of food security. To do this, the solution is to select cultivated varieties that are resilient to environmental stresses in order to stabilize production.
Thus, the ARECOVER experiment was set up to characterize the response of pea to water deficit in order to design annual legume ideotypes adapted to climate change. Indeed, the pea, as a legume, has environmental, cultural and food interests. In particular, we can mention the capacity of legumes to fix atmospheric nitrogen (N2), which allows reducing fertilizer inputs, or the fact that pea is a nutritional source of protein, starch and micronutrients.
In order to characterize the tolerance of pea to water stress, different functional traits were calculated (specific water uptake activity, water use efficiency) and related to structural variables (biomass of different plant organs). We were thus able to characterize the different water and carbon flow management strategies in five spring pea genotypes.