Abstract
The agronomic and environmental importance of maintaining and/or increasing crop production, while reducing resource inputs and land-use change cannot be over stated especially in light of climate change and a human population projected to grow to nine billion this century. Mutualistic plant-microbe interactions offer the potential to address agricultural production and environmental cost issues. In concert with other novel ag-ronomic technologies and management regimes, such as precision agriculture and cli-mate smart agriculture, plant-microbial mutualisms could help increase crop produc-tion and reduce yield losses by developing resistance and/or resilience to edaphic, bio-logic and climatic variability. We propose expanding relatively new agricultural man-agement approaches such as Precision and Climate Smart Agriculture (Box 1) to include the microbial components of crops and soil. From an applied science perspective, com-bining breeding strategies with applications of co-adaptive mutualistic plant-microbial associations could result in what we refer to as community complementarity. Community complementarity is an approach designed to utilize coevolutionary and ecological phe-nomena to develop cropping systems capable of actively adapting to climate change via integration of mutualistic microbial interactions.
