RISOCAS is a joint project of the Department of Crop Water Stress Management of the Institute for Crop Production and Agroecology in the Tropics and Subtropics (Universität Hohenheim, the African Rice Center (WARDA, Benin), CIRAD (France), the Institute for Rural Economy (IER, Mali) and the National Center for Applied Research for Rural Development (FOFIFA, Madagascar). It answered to the call "Adaptation of African Agriculture to Climate Change" of the Federal Ministry for Economic Coorporation and Developement.

Irrigated rice, rainfed sorghum, and rainfed upland rice are three of the most important staple small-grain cereals in Sub-Saharan Africa. Phenology, growth, water use and attainable yield of rice and sorghum are subject to seasonal climatic patterns. These patterns have already changed and will do so in the near future. To avoid negative impacts, crop adaptation strategies will be required, both in terms of varietal development and crop management.

In order to develop coping strategies for increasing climate variability and weather extremes, a broad range of varietal types of rice and sorghum will be studied on existing climatic gradients that cover expected ranges of change, such as temporal/intra-annual gradients (irrigated rice in Senegal), latitudinal gradients (sorghum on a N-S transect in Mali) and altitudinal gradients (upland rice in Madagascar). Relevant meteorological data, site-specific soil characteristics and water balances, and parameters of growth and yield will be monitored.

These data will be used to identify valuable traits and ideotype concepts for varietal improvement and to adapt, calibrate and field-validate crop models (based on the crop model ‘SARRAH’). The resulting tools will allow predictive applications in the context of climate change scenarios. more