Modeling custom plant traits with HortControl at Bioversity International

With more than 1,500 different types of edible and wild species of banana, Bioversity International is home to the world’s largest collection of banana germplasm. The organization aims to contribute to the secure long-term conservation of the entire banana gene pool while also conducting research to increase the diversity of cultivars within the banana industry (1). Securing long-term conservation means growing and assessing the entire gene pool on a frequent basis, and this is just one process. Assessing all of these plants is a manual, repetitive, and time-consuming process that requires extensive human labor. A wide range of parameters, such as biomass, leaf area, and growth rates, are traditionally measured by hand, making it very labor intensive to perform frequently across hundreds of genotypes. Digital and automated plant phenotyping solutions such as PlantEye alleviate many of these challenges, offering high throughput measurement of over 20 parameters of plant growth and ...