Professors receive $4.6 million to study impact of climate change on potential biofuel source

AUSTIN, Texas—Researchers at The University of Texas at Austin, working with scientists from the USDA, have received a $4.6 million grant to explore how switchgrass, a native prairie grass and promising source of biofuel, will fare under future climate change.

"We're combining our strengths to tackle a number of basic problems in plant biology and ecology, especially in the context of biofuels and future climate change," says Tom Juenger, associate professor of integrative biology. "Our project will explore the limits of plant productivity by integrating a number of perspectives. Our USDA collaborators will help us to translate our findings into real world tests of biofuels production."

Juenger, Christine Hawkes and Tim Keitt, faculty in the School of Biological Sciences, are the principal investigators of the project, which was awarded by the National Science Foundation through its Plant Genome Research Program.

Among other goals, the researchers expect to be able to make better forecasts about how different switchgrass varieties will perform under future climate environments, and to uncover many of the genetic mechanisms of switchgrass tolerance to drought.

"One thing to take into account when considering biofuel sources of energy," says Juenger, "is that our estimates for productivity are based largely on yields from really good agricultural lands. The truth, however, is that if biofuel crops are going to be viable they will need to be productive on marginal land, with few inputs, and under more stressful environmental conditions."

In order to examine switchgrass responses to drought, the researchers will plant both agronomic and native varieties under experimental drought conditions at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, the Brackenridge Field Laboratory, the USDA facility in Temple, Texas, and 10 more USDA sites in Texas, Arkansas, Missouri and Nebraska.

"Many studies, to this point, have focused on which switchgrass cultivars are productive in which locations across the U.S.," says Juenger, "and yet the question we really need to be asking is which locations and cultivars will be productive in 20 or 40 years, based on predictions of climate change."