YESWECAST Operational Group: Conservation and recovery of the ancestral chestnut genome for fruit production, improving its resilience to climate change and phytosanitary threats.

This project will create a catalogue of plant material from century-old chestnut trees in different regions of Spain with an associated characterisation of their tolerance to different stresses, and a network of conservation and development plots will be established with said materials, as a measure for the conservation of genetic resources. These plots will allow in the future the cultivation and propagation of different varieties and/or genotypes with greater resistance to biotic and abiotic factors, which can be made available for various research and development programmes, in addition to being able to be used in fields of mother trees to provide any interested chestnut grower with proven plant material to use in grafting their farm or carrying out new plantations.

Innovative adaptive measures will be developed in chestnut management in the face of climate change (CC), in addition to digitalisation measures for the sector to manage the resource, as well as pests and diseases in the face of this. In this sense, the main variables that affect the production and optimal development of chestnut in the face of CC and its main biotic disturbances will also be determined through continuous monitoring. This will allow obtaining an analysis of the spectrum-phenology of chestnut in conditions of maximum phytosanitary status and without significant alterations, a scheme with the most relevant dates for monitoring, as well as a selection of indices and values that will allow identifying changes for the different pathologies. Regarding the latter, descriptive predictive models of the conditions, values and thresholds for the identification of risk levels that allow varying the management conditions for the chestnut grower will be obtained, and all the information obtained can be easily updated in the future, by increasing the data obtained by the analysed sensors.

A transfer line will be developed through cooperation between the sector and the R&D&I ecosystem, in order to promote the transfer of knowledge, the dissemination of results and the participation of the different agents of the chestnut value chain in this process, with the support of digital platforms, guaranteeing its durability and cooperation between agents. In this sense, an application will be obtained that will provide information on the risk levels for each identified disturbance, based on the data that is obtained in real time. This application will help to collect production data and different phenological variables, presence of in situ conditions, through a development that allows the generation of information without data coverage, and that sends this information to a server automatically when it is retrieved. Thus, different technicians will work simultaneously feeding a common database, which will be available to the cooperation network and those public organizations responsible for plant health.