Keeping a watchful eye on crops -🌾📡- Focus on non-invasive plant imaging technologies

📚 PHENOTYPING – activity or process of determining, analyzing, or predicting all or part of an organism’s characteristic or trait (phenotype).

🚜 Field applications (including aerial and ground-based cameras and sensors) include a variety of technologies for the estimation of yield and field performance of crops over large geographic areas.

🏡 Indoor applications comprised of fixed systems and handheld devices that could be used to:
– measure plant growth rate,
– estimate shoot & root morphological traits & biomass,
– detect crop stress,
– measure physiological and biochemical traits,
– study the viability of seeds.

🔎 A different types of captured data provide a comprehensive evaluation of specific crop traits:
• Colour RGB images -> Plant morphology, relative chlorophyll content, pathogenic lesions, seed yield, agronomic traits
• Near IR imaging -> Tissue & soil water content
• Far IR imaging -> Canopy & leaf temperature, water use efficiency, salt tolerance
• Hyperspectral imaging -> Carbohydrates, pigments & protein content
• FTIR Imaging Spectroscopy -> Cellular localization of metabolites (sugars, protein, aromatics)
• Fluorescence imaging -> Photosynthesis efficiency

📷 Image: Overview of non-invasive imaging technologies applicable in plant phenotyping (image by Content Farmers; based on Nguyen et al. 2022).