b'Below: The Swann lab team. (L-R) Sam Pennypacker, Greta Shum, Abigail Swann, Jennifer Hsiao, Amy Liu, Claire ZarakasPREDICTING THERE IS A SAYINGin agriculture among farmers, control the controllables and manage for the uncontrollable. Now, the biggest uncontrollable factor in raising a crop is the weather CLIMATE-READYand there is no question that the climate patterns being expe-rienced today are different from those experienced 10-15 years ago. That also means that in 10-15 years, the climate patterns will be different than today. This leads to the question of how cur-CORN rent crop varieties will perform in future weather patterns.Weathering the Future with Climate Models Abigail Swann, University of Washington atmospheric and Using climate models to drive seedclimate sciences and biology professor is tackling this ques-tion. Swann is applying her experience with climate science and innovation.By Peter Scharpe, Seed World Contributor investigating plant physiology in changing climates to agricul-tural systems, specifically corn production. A lot of my work is at the global scale, looking at various land systems and plants, and how climate matters for the functioning of those plants, Swann says. She has focused her research on studying how various plants function in current climate systems, observe how their functions have changed as the climate has changed and to predict how changes in climate will affect plant functions and the surrounding ecosystem. She and her team have now taken that concept and applied it to corn plants in a field. The goal is to take the established ability to simulate a multi-tude of plant trait combinationsin this case corn trait combi-16/ SEEDWORLD.COMDECEMBER 2024'