The International Crop Science Congress (ICSC) is a regularly held event allowing crop scientists to integrate current knowledge into a global context and international applications. The 7th ICSC was held on August 14-19, 2016 in Beijing, China, with the theme “Crop Science: Innovation and Sustainability”. 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.

China is a leading country in the production of several minor cereals such as foxtail millet, Job's tears, naked oat, and naked barley. Sorghum and proso millet have also contributed greatly to Chinese agriculture. Foxtail millet, sorghum, barley, and proso millet were widely grown as major crops 60 years ago, and the reduction in their cultivation area reflects historical changes in Chinese agriculture over the past decades. Systematic germplasm collections from the 1950s to the 1990s gathered more than 66,690 accessions of these minor cereals, and for some of them, the Chinese germplasm collections are the largest in the world; for example, the 27,700 accessions of foxtail millet. Germplasm evaluations of each cereal species have focused mainly on drought tolerance, nutritional quality, and resistance to their main diseases. Comparisons among lines and selection of those with desirable traits were the main breeding methods for minor cereals in the 1950s and 1960s, but these methods were replaced by crossbreeding in the 1970s. Newly developed cultivars have greatly changed the production situation, and many super cultivars have become milestones in crop breeding history. In this review, we describe the distribution and ecoregions, origin and domestication, and landmark varieties of several minor cereals in China. Nearly all of the minor cereals are drought-tolerant and fertilizer-efficient. The requirements for environmentally friendly crops and a more diverse food supply for humans and animals provide new opportunities to cultivate minor cereals in the drier and warmer environmental conditions that are predicted in the future.

Food legumes comprise all legumes grown for human food in China as either dry grains or vegetables, except for soybean and groundnut. China has a vast territory with complex ecological conditions. Rotation, intercropping, and mixed cropping involving pulses are normal cropping systems in China. Whether indigenous or introduced crops, pulses have played an important role in Chinese cropping systems and made an important contribution to food resources for humans since ancient times. The six major food legume species (pea, faba bean, common bean, mung bean, adzuki bean, and cowpea) are the most well-known pulses in China, as well as those with more local distributions; runner bean, lima bean, chickpea, lentil, grass pea, lupine, rice bean, black gram, hyacinth bean, pigeon pea, velvet bean, winged bean, guar bean, sword bean, and jack bean. China has remained the world's leading producer of peas, faba beans, mung beans, and adzuki beans in recent decades, as documented by FAO statistics and China Agriculture Statistical Reports. The demand for food legumes as a healthy food will markedly increase with the improvement of living standards in China. Since China officially joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, imports of pea from Canada and Australia have rapidly increased, resulting in reduced prices for dry pea and other food legumes. With reduced profits for food legume crops, their sowing area and total production has decreased within China. At the same time, the rising consumer demand for vegetable food legumes as a healthy food has led to attractive market prices and sharp production increases in China. Vegetable food legumes have reduced growing duration and enable flexibility in cropping systems. In the future, production of dry food legumes will range from stable to slowly decreasing, while production of vegetable food legumes will continue to increase.

Rapeseed (Brassica napus L.) is the largest oilseed crop in China and accounts for about 20% of world production. For the last 10 years, the production, planting area, and yield of rapeseed have been stable, with improvement of seed quality and especially seed oil content. China is among the leading countries in rapeseed genomic research internationally, having jointly with other countries accomplished the whole genome sequencing of rapeseed and its two parental species, Brassica oleracea and Brassica rapa. Progress on functional genomics including the identification of QTL governing important agronomic traits such as yield, seed oil content, fertility regulation, disease and insect resistance, abiotic stress, nutrition use efficiency, and pod shattering resistance has been achieved. As a consequence, molecular markers have been developed and used in breeding programs. During 2005-2014, 215 rapeseed varieties were registered nationally, including 210 winter- and 5 spring-type varieties. Mechanization across the whole process of rapeseed production was investigated and operating instructions for all relevant techniques were published. Modern techniques for rapeseed field management such as high-density planting, controlled-release fertilizer, and biocontrol of disease and pests combined with precision tools such as drones have been developed and are being adopted in China. With the application of advanced breeding and production technologies, in the near future, the oil yield and quality of rapeseed varieties will be greatly increased, and more varieties with desirable traits, especially early maturation, high yield, high resistance to biotic and abiotic stress, and suitability for mechanized harvesting will be developed. Application of modern technologies on the mechanized management of rapeseed will greatly increase grower profit.

China is becoming the largest grain producing and carbon-emitting country in the world, with a steady increase in population and economic development. A review of Chinese experiences in ensuring food self-sufficiency and reducing carbon emission in the agricultural sector can provide a valuable reference for similar countries and regions. According to a comprehensive review of previous publications and recent field observations, China has experienced on average a larger and faster climatic warming trend than the global trend, and there are large uncertainties in precipitation change, which shows a non-significantly increasing trend. Existing evidence shows that the effects of climatic warming on major staple crop production in China could be markedly negative or positive, depending on the specific cropping region, season, and crop. However, historical data analysis and field warming experiments have shown that moderate warming, of less than 2.0 °C, could benefit crop production in China overall. During the most recent warming decades, China has made successful adaptations in cropping systems, such as new cultivar breeding, cropping region adjustment, and cropping practice optimization, to exploit the positive rather than to avoid the negative effects of climatic warming on crop growth. All of these successful adaptations have greatly increased crop yield, leading to higher resource use efficiency as well as greatly increased soil organic carbon content with reduced greenhouse gas emissions. Under the warming climate, China has not only achieved great successes in crop production but also realized a large advance in greenhouse gas emission mitigation. Chinese experiences in cropping system innovation for coping with climatic warming demonstrate that food security and climatic warming mitigation can be synergized through policy, knowledge, and technological innovation. With the increasingly critical status of food security and climatic warming, further efforts should be invested in new agricultural policy, knowledge and technology creation, and popularization of climate-smart agriculture, and more financial investments should be made in field infrastructure development to increase cropping system resilience in China.

To meet the major challenge of increasing rice production to feed a growing population under increasing water scarcity, many water-saving regimes have been introduced in irrigated rice, such as an aerobic rice system, non-flooded mulching cultivation, and alternate wetting and drying (AWD). These regimes could substantially enhance water use efficiency (WUE) by reducing irrigation water. However, such enhancements greatly compromise grain yield. Recent work has shown that moderate AWD, in which photosynthesis is not severely inhibited and plants can rehydrate overnight during the soil drying period, or plants are rewatered at a soil water potential of − 10 to − 15 kPa, or midday leaf potential is approximately − 0.60 to − 0.80 MPa, or the water table is maintained at 10 to 15 cm below the soil surface, could increase not only WUE but also grain yield. Increases in grain yield WUE under moderate AWD are due mainly to reduced redundant vegetative growth; improved canopy structure and root growth; elevated hormonal levels, in particular increases in abscisic acid levels during soil drying and cytokinin levels during rewatering; and enhanced carbon remobilization from vegetative tissues to grain. Moderate AWD could also improve rice quality, including reductions in grain arsenic accumulation, and reduce methane emissions from paddies. Adoption of moderate AWD with an appropriate nitrogen application rate may exert a synergistic effect on grain yield and result in higher WUE and nitrogen use efficiency. Further research is needed to understand root-soil interaction and evaluate the long-term effects of moderate AWD on sustainable agriculture.

Polyploidy plays a major role in genome evolution, which corresponds to environmental changes over millions of years. The mechanisms of genome evolution, particularly during the process of domestication, are of broad interest in the fields of plant science and crop breeding. Upland cotton is derived from the hybridization and polyploidization of its ancient A and D diploid ancestors. As a result, cotton is a model for polyploid genome evolution and crop domestication. To explore the genomic mysteries of allopolyploid cotton, we investigated asymmetric evolution and domestication in the A and D subgenomes. Interestingly, more structural rearrangements have been characterized in the A subgenome than in the D subgenome. Correspondingly, more transposable elements, a greater number of lost and disrupted genes, and faster evolution have been identified in the A subgenome. In contrast, the centromeric retroelement (RT-domain related) sequence of tetraploid cotton derived from the D subgenome progenitor was found to have invaded the A subgenome centromeres after allotetrapolyploid formation. Although there is no genome-wide expression bias between the subgenomes, as with expression-level alterations, gene expression bias of homoeologous gene pairs is widespread and varies from tissue to tissue. Further, there are more positively selected genes for fiber yield and quality in the A subgenome and more for stress tolerance in the D subgenome, indicating asymmetric domestication. This review highlights the asymmetric subgenomic evolution and domestication of allotetraploid cotton, providing valuable genomic resources for cotton research and enhancing our understanding of the basis of many other allopolyploids.

Plant germplasm underpins much of crop genetic improvement. Millions of germplasm accessions have been collected and conserved ex situ and/or in situ, and the major challenge is now how to exploit and utilize this abundant resource. Genomics-based plant germplasm research (GPGR) or “Genoplasmics” is a novel cross-disciplinary research field that seeks to apply the principles and techniques of genomics to germplasm research. We describe in this paper the concept, strategy, and approach behind GPGR, and summarize current progress in the areas of the definition and construction of core collections, enhancement of germplasm with core collections, and gene discovery from core collections. GPGR is opening a new era in germplasm research. The contribution, progress and achievements of GPGR in the future are predicted.

Dissecting the genetic architecture of complex traits is an ongoing challenge for geneticists. Two complementary approaches for genetic mapping, linkage mapping and association mapping have led to successful dissection of complex traits in many crop species. Both of these methods detect quantitative trait loci (QTL) by identifying marker-trait associations, and the only fundamental difference between them is that between mapping populations, which directly determine mapping resolution and power. Based on this difference, we first summarize in this review the advances and limitations of family-based mapping and natural population-based mapping instead of linkage mapping and association mapping. We then describe statistical methods used for improving detection power and computational speed and outline emerging areas such as large-scale meta-analysis for genetic mapping in crops. In the era of next-generation sequencing, there has arisen an urgent need for proper population design, advanced statistical strategies, and precision phenotyping to fully exploit high-throughput genotyping.