Staff Profile:Professor Tim Wheeler

Name:

Professor Tim Wheeler

Job Title:

Professor of Crop Science

Responsibilities:

• Deputy Chief Scientific Adviser (80%) at the Department for International Development
• Head, Crops and Climate Group

• Deputy Director (sustainable agriculture), Centre of Food Security

Areas of Interest:

Tim Wheeler is currently Professor of Crop Science at the University of Reading and Deputy Chief Scientific Adviser for the UK Department for International Development. For more than 20 years he has published extensively on how climate change could impact on the sustainability of agriculture and food. Tim has provided advice on the sustainability of food and farming to agri-businesses and food multi-nationals, often up to Board level. He has extensive experience of working with policy-makers in the UK and internationally, providing information and advice to Ministers and acting as Specialist Adviser to the House of Lords in 2010. In 2005 he gave the prestigious Royal Society Public Lecture on 'Growing crops in a changing climate'. Tim will join BBSRC Council in April 2012.

• Author of 164 scientific publications since 1991
• Awarded over £6,400,000 in research contracts in total to date
• Associate Editor of Agricultural and Forest Meteorology, since 2007
• Co-organiser of the annual UK Agricultural Modeller's Meeting, since 2005
• Principal Investigator in the NERC-National Centre for Atmospheric Science - Climate, since 2006
• Co-author of a Royal Society Statement on Climate Change and Agriculture submitted to the G8 Summit in Gleneagles, 2005
• Chair of the University Committee on Postgraduate Research Studies 2004 - 2008, and member of 3 senior committees within the University.
• Regular contributor to national and international news items on climate change and agriculture.

Research groups / Centres:

Crops and Climate Group

Walker Institute

Publications:

I am author of 164 scientific publications since 1991 including 88 in primary international refereed journals. Examples of recent publications in the last three years are:

• Madan P., Jagadish S.V.K., Craufurd P.Q., Fitzgerald M., Lafarge T. and Wheeler T.R. (2012). Effect of elevated CO₂ and high temperature on seed set and grain quality of rice. Journal of Experimental Botany (In press)
• Wheeler T. (2012). Wheat Crops feel the heat. Nature Climate Change (2) 152-153.
• Wheeler, T. and Kay, M. (2010) Food crop production, water and climate change in the developing world. Outlook on Agriculture, 39(4). 239-243.
• Jagadish S.V.K., Cairns J., Lafitte R., Wheeler T.R., Price A.H. and Craufurd P.Q. (2010). Genetic Analysis of Heat Tolerance at Anthesis in Rice. Crop Science, 50 (5). 1633-1641.
• Jagadish S.V.K., Muthurajan R., Oane R., Wheeler T.R., Heuer S., Bennett J. and Craufurd P.Q. (2010). Physiological and proteomic approaches to address heat tolerance during anthesis in rice (Oryza sativa L.). Journal of Experimental Botany, 61 (1). 143-156.
• Parry M., Evans A., Rosegrant M.W. and Wheeler T. (2009). Climate change and the risk of hunger: the scale of the challenge and required response. United Nations World Food Programme.
• Parry M., Arnell N., Berry P., Dodman D., Fankhauser S., Hope C., Kovats S., Nicholls R., Satterthwaite D., Tiffin R. and Wheeler T. (2009). Assessing the costs of adaptation to climate change - A review of the UNFCCC and other recent estimates. International Institute for Environment and Development (UK).
• Craufurd P.Q. and Wheeler T.R. (2009). Climate change and the flowering time of annual crops. Journal of Experimental Botany 60 (9), 2529-2539.

Key earlier papers

• Hansen J., Challinor A., Ines A., Wheeler T., Moron V. (2006). Translating climate forecasts into agricultural terms: advances and challenges. Climate Research, 33, 27-41.
• Challinor A.J., Wheeler T.R., Garforth C.J., Craufurd P.Q. and Kassam A. (2007). Assessing the vulnerability of food crop systems in Africa to climate change. Climatic Change, 83, 381-399.
• Slingo J.M., Challinor A.J., Hoskins B.J., Wheeler T.R. (2005). Introduction: Food crops in a changing climate. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 360, 1983-1989.
• Wheeler T.R., Craufurd P.Q., Ellis R.H., Porter J. R. and Vara Prasad P.V. (2000). Temperature variability and the yield of annual crops. Agriculture, Ecosystems and Environment, 82, 159-167.
• Wheeler T.R., Hong T.D., Ellis R.H., Batts G.R., Morison J.I.L. and Hadley P. (1996). The duration and rate of grain growth, and harvest index, of wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) in response to temperature and CO₂. Journal of Experimental Botany, 47, 623-630.
• Wheeler T.R., Morison J.I.L., Ellis R.H. and Hadley P. (1994). Effects of CO₂, temperature and their interaction on the growth and yield of carrot (Daucus carota L.). Plant, Cell and Environment, 17, 1275-1284.

Qualifications:

BSc, MSc, PhD

The next two films in the University of Reading Research Showcase series

The effects of climate change on crops

http://www.rdg.ac.uk/research/researchshowcase/climatechange/res-climateoncrops.asp

One of the major challenges of climate change is to use climate models to help us predict the effect on food crops in the future. We need to assess how changes in temperature and rainfall will affect the productivity of our food crops. We also need to consider how the variability of climate will alter, and look at how we can forecast this. How can agriculture adapt to offset the negative effects of climate change, and make the most of any opportunities which might occur

The effects of crops on climate change

http://www.rdg.ac.uk/research/researchshowcase/climatechange/res-cropsonclimate.asp

We spend a lot of time thinking how climate can affect crops but crops affect climate themselves. A substantial amount of the lands surface is used for crop and agricultural production: how we use that land can affect our climate. Altering the characteristics of the land's surface can alter the way in which water and heat flows from the land's surface to the atmosphere and back, and if this is a large enough change, it can ultimately affect the regional climate.