High-Throughput Field-Phenotyping Tools for Plant Breeding and Precision Agriculture

Abstract

High-throughput field phenotyping has garnered major attention in recent years leading to the development of several new protocols for recording various plant traits of interest. Phenotyping of plants for breeding and for precision agriculture have different requirements due to different sizes of the plots and fields, differing purposes and the urgency of the action required after phenotyping. While in plant breeding phenotyping is done on several thousand small plots mainly to evaluate them for various traits, in plant cultivation, phenotyping is done in large fields to detect the occurrence of plant stresses and weeds at an early stage. The aim of this review is to highlight how various high-throughput phenotyping methods are used for plant breeding and farming and the key differences in the applications of such methods. Thus, various techniques for plant phenotyping are presented together with applications of these techniques for breeding and cultivation. Several examples from the literature using these techniques are summarized and the key technical aspects are highlighted.

Physiological Responses of Selected Vegetable Crop Species to Water Stress

“…Spectral vegetation indices indicate the absorption of solar energy of the canopy in the visible light spectrum. Health status and water deficit of vegetation can be monitored by different vegetation indices and it can also determine the need for irrigation [126][127][128][129]. The normalized differential vegetation index (NDVI) expresses the ratio of spectral reflectance on the canopy in the infrared and red region and it is used to monitor the effect of water stress on plant growth and forecast biomass [130,131].…”

Using NDVI to Differentiate Wheat Genotypes Productivity Under Dryland and Irrigated Conditions

“…Plant genotypes respond differently to climate, soil type, irrigation, and other management practices, thus we need as many studies as possible to complement the existing literature. As the field of high throughput plant phenotyping (HTPP) for plant breeding and selection, is still in its infancy [30][31][32], this study is a valuable addition to this rapidly growing field [16,[33][34][35][36]. Use of several genotypes in this study adds breadth to the relationship between spectral measurements and yield in winter wheat.…”

Phenotyping and Plant Breeding: Overcoming the Barriers

“…Yet, plant phenotyping is still the bottleneck for breeding and farming (Chawade et al, 2019) and the average plant-breeding program has not been adopting the new developments adequately (Awada et al, 2018) Among the solutions proposed, a major international effort is being directed towards data and protocol standardization (Pieruschka and Schurr, 2019) that will be discussed later.…”