The International Phytobiomes Conference 2024 will bring together a broad community of U.S. and international scientists from the public and private sector as well as agricultural stakeholders to collectively advance the emerging field of phytobiome science.
Plants grow in association and interaction with complex communities of organisms, environmental conditions, and management practices. The term “Phytobiomes” encompasses all of this complexity. It refers to a plant (“phyto”) in a distinct geographical unit (“biome”) – a field, grassland, greenhouse, garden, or forest. A phytobiome includes the plant itself, all micro- and macro-organisms living in, on, or around the plant – such as microbes, animals, insects and other plants – and the environment, including soil, air, water, weather, and climate.
Understanding entire systems of Phytobiomes will be critical to ensuring sustainable global food security in the next decades in the context of population growth, climate change, and the necessity to preserve biodiversity and natural resources. The International Phytobiomes Conference 2024 will bring together a broad community of scientists to collectively advance knowledge of phytobiomes to increase the production of a sufficient supply of safe and nutritious food, feed, and fiber.
Over three days, agricultural stakeholders, public and private sector agronomists, plant pathologists, geneticists, microbiologist, soil scientists, data scientists, biostatisticians, plant physiologists, nutrient management experts, weather/climate scientists – to name only some disciplines – will present their research, discuss, and share their expertise to advance knowledge on how phytobiome components interact and affect each other.
The Conference program will cover a wide range of topics related to phytobiomes: farm sustainability, interactions between microbial communities and associated plants, soil health, nutrient management and uptake, the use of models and imaging to probe the Phytobiome, the development of databases and modeling tools for next generation agriculture and the transformation of Phytobiome discoveries into products.
The Conference is organized by the International Alliance for Phytobiomes Research
This will be the fifth phytobiomes conference. The first was held in 2015 in Washington, D.C. (USA), the second — a Keystone Symposia — was held in 2016 in Santa Fe, New Mexico (USA), the third was held in Montpellier (France) in 2018, and the fourth edition was held in 2022 in Denver, Colorado (USA). These conferences were widely attended by about 200 participants coming from 20 countries in North and South America, Europe, Asia, Africa and the middle-East.