Gustavo A. Slafer

Gustavo A. Slafer

Universitat de Lleida

Life & Medical Sciences

Gustavo A. Slafer (PhD, University of Melbourne) is ICREA Research Professor at the University of Lleida (Catalonia, Spain). He is also (i) Honorary Professor of the Universities of Nottingham (UK) and BuenosAires (Argentina); (ii) Editor (with different titles, always in charge of the review process, making the final decision on acceptance/rejection) of Euphytica (Netherlands), Food Energy Security (UK), Spanish Journal Agricultural Research (Spain) and Scientific Reports (UK); (iii) Editorial Board member of other JCR-journals; and (iv) member of Scientific Advisory Council of GADEA Foundation (Spain). He has co-edited 7 scientific books, by publishers in USA and UK, and published more than 40 chapters in international books and more than 200 papers in JCR-journals. His h-index at Dec. 2022 was 64 using WoS-CoreCollection (h-indexn= 88 in google scholar). He has been invited several times to deliver talks in international events.

Research interests

My research is focused on Crop Physiology: a relatively novel branch of science linking more fundamental physiological knowledge with realistic crop-breeding and crop-management developments through a genuine translational research approach. In this context, I study the mechanisms underlying the responses of field crops to environmental and genetic factors at the crop level of organisation. The environmental factors include management practices (e.g. irrigation or fertilization) and less manageable environmental factors (e.g. radiation, photoperiod and temperature). Genetic factors include from diverse genotypes through specific populations to particular genes (NILs). I study in this context the physiology of yield; carbon and nitrogen relationships and crop developmental processes with the aim of identifying alternatives to traditional farming and breeding practises to enhance the efficiency of resource use.

Selected publications

- Slafer GA, Garcia GA, Serrago RA & Miralles DJ 2022, 'Physiological drivers of responses of grains per m(2) to environmental and genetic factors in wheat', Field Crops Research, 285, 108593.

- Reynolds MP, Slafer GA, Foulkes JM et al. 2022, 'A wiring diagram to integrate physiological traits of wheat yield potential', Nature Food, 3, 5, 318 - 324.

- Savin R, Cossani CM, Dahan R, Ayad JY, Albrizio R, Todorovic M, Karrou M & Slafer GA 2022, 'Intensifying cereal management in dryland Mediterranean agriculture: Rainfed wheat and barley responses to nitrogen fertilisation', European Journal Of Agronomy, 137, 126518.

- Beral A, Girousse C, Le Gouis J, Allard V & Slafer GA 2022, 'Physiological bases of cultivar differences in average grain weight in wheat: Scaling down from plot to individual grain in elite material', Field Crops Research, 289, 108713.

- Foulkes MJ, Molero G, Griffths S, Slafer GA,& Reynolds MP 2022. 'Yield portential'. In: “Wheat Improvement. Food Security in a Changing Climate” (M.P. Reynolds and H.-J. Braun, Eds), ISBN: 978-3-030-90672-6, Springer (an imprint of Springer Nature), Switzerland, pp. 379-396

Selected research activities

Editorial activities

Editor or Associate Editor (in all cases responsible for on acceptance/rejection of mss) of Euphytica (Netherlands), Food Energy Security (UK), Spanish Journal of Agricultural Research (Spain), Scientific Reports (UK), The Crop Journal (Crop Science Society of China and Elsevier, The Netherlands), and Frontiers in Plant Science (Switzerland)

Member of the Editorial Boards of Field Crops Research (Netherlands), European Journal of Agronomy (EU), and International Journal of Molecular Science - Plant Science (Switzerland)