IPPN Webinar: Combining 3D & Gravimetric data to breed climate smart crops

The International Plant Phenotyping network (IPPN) invited us to present during their Phenomics webinar series. An opportunity to talk about breeding drought resistant crops faster by combining 3D, Multispectral and Gravimetric data.

There is no better way to present this then to ask our client Vincent Vadez, Principal Scientist at CGIAR / IRD. In 2014 we developed, together with Vincent, our first FieldScan platform (2014) at Icrisat. The system had to be able to combine 3D and gravimetric data in the field. Listen to Vincent’s talk or download his paper.

Paper: https://plantmethods.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13007-020-00680-8

Combining digital phenotyping solutions

Understanding the transpiration rate of plants and its regulation to changing environments or applied agricultural agents are essential to identify water saving traits or properties so that plants can better resist drought. Gravimetric platforms are a simple, but very effective tool to assess the transpiration rates of entire plants in high temporal resolution and in high-throughput, however it is essential to normalize the transpiration of a plant to its leaf area. This is a unique feature of Phenospex products that deliver both in one package/run. Transpiration rates are assessed with load cells and the shoot is captured with high-tech multispectral 3D scanner PlantEye.

Transpiration restriction to increasing VPD

To demonstrate the power of this combination we invited Dr. Vincent Vadez from IRD (Institut de Recherche pour le Développement) in France to talk about his latest research, in which he demonstrates how to identify genotypes with drought tolerance potential. Such an analytical approach can be directly used for prescriptive breeding applications. References: Kar, S., Tanaka, R., Korbu, L.B. et al. Automated discretization of ‘transpiration restriction to increasing VPD’ features from outdoors high-throughput phenotyping data. Plant Methods 16, 140 (2020).