PhD Studentship: Understanding and improving the hailstorm resistance of crop plants BBSRC SWBio DTP PhD studentship 2025 Entry

About:

The BBSRC-funded SWBio DTP involves a partnership of world-renown universities, research institutes and industry, based mainly across the South West and Wales.

This partnership has established international, national and regional scientific networks, and widely recognised research excellence and facilities.

We aim to provide you with outstanding interdisciplinary bioscience research training, underpinned by transformative technologies.

Project Description

In times of changing climate, hailstorms are increasing in frequency and intensity. Climate models predict up to 50% more hail-induced damage by 2050. Hailstorms can cause considerable yield losses; however, not all plants are equally affected. Identifying and understanding the  adaptations that enable some plants to survive hail impacts relatively unscathed will be key to breeding crops that are fit for the future. Past research has focused on field-scale assessments of damage only. This PhD project will investigate the interaction of hail impacts with plants at the individual organism level.

The student will:

• characterise the mechanical properties of leaves and stems, as well as their kinematic and physiological responses to simulated hail impacts,
• establish a framework for objectively assessing and quantifying impact-induced damage, and
• investigate the influence of weather preceding a hailstorm on the likelihood and severity of damage, with the aim to identify leaf traits and growth conditions that confer increased damage resistance during extreme weather events.

The project builds on previous projects in the main supervisor’s lab (https://mechanicalecology.exeter.ac.uk/?page_id=84) and benefits from a custom-built and extensively tested hail simulation setup, as well as the availability of four brand new, fully controllable weather simulation units at Exeter University. The student will be based in a lab with two decades of experience of studying the biomechanical adaptations of plants to deal with physical challenges in their natural environment.

An interdisciplinary supervisor team of ecologists, biomechanists, molecular biologists and computer scientists offers the opportunity to receive training in a diversity of methods from 3D motion capture and AI-guided video analysis to state-of-the-art bioimaging techniques, physiological measurements, and quantification of molecular responses to hail impacts. The project would equally suit a student from a biology, physics or engineering background, and it is flexible to accommodate individual interests and strengths within the overall scope.

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