The "PLant sciences in the ANThropocene" (PLANT) workshop took place from March 24 to April 4, 2025 at the Institut Pascal of the University Paris-Saclay (campus about 25 km south of Paris).

Watch the videos of the presentations on the Institut Pascal YouTube channel.

This 2-week workshop addressed key challenges for the international Plant Sciences community, from basic sciences to socio-economic and environmental aspects including climate change. It gathered about 100 international scientists. The attendance mixed high stature senior scientists, together with numerous younger ones.

The program focused on three themes:
- Theme I: "Frontiers in Plant Sciences fundamental research" (March 24-25-26)
- Theme II: “Feeding the planet: roles for Plant Sciences and associated environmental and socio-economic challenges" (March 27-28-31 and April 1)
- Theme III: "Plants as factories: from chemical compounds to mitigating climate change” (April 2-3-4)
Each of these themes also covered cross-cutting issues: training, innovation and outreach activities.

Mornings consisted mainly of presentations by about 40 senior scientists, who provided their vision of how to rise to those challenges, while the afternoon sessions were devoted principally to brainstorming across generations on selected topics. This workshop thus required input from all participants, the goals being the emergence of consensus community opinions and the specification of paths to success for several major challenges, be they at the level of training the next generation, guiding deciders of public policies, or connecting with the wider public on the importance of plant sciences in the Anthropocene. All these challenges are of high complexity and depend on several disciplines. Thus, beyond plant biologists and geneticists, some participants came from agronomy, ecology, social and environmental sciences, economics, and also from chemical, physical and computational sciences.

Syntheses in the form of opinion papers will be drafted for publication.

This program was chaired by Olivier Martin and Loïc Lepiniec.

Project managers : Francesca Sconfienza (Institut Pascal) and Marie-Jeanne Sellier (SPS)

Program