Agriculture in the Digital Era

Phenomics, the systematic study of phenotypes, is an emerging field of research in biology. It complements genomics, the study of genotypes, and is becoming an increasingly critical tool to understand plant-environment interactions (also known as genotypes-by-environment interactions). These interactions determine the structure and function of plants (i.e. phenotypes) and thus determine essential performance parameters like yield, productivity or nitrogen- use efficiency. To understand these fundamental processes, phenotypes need to be quantitatively assessed so that the observed variation in response to the environment can be linked to the plant genetic make-up. Phenomics studies make use of both high- and low-throughput imaging (e.g. RGB or hyperspectral imaging) and measurement devices (e.g wireless sensor networks) to capture data non destructively at different spatial and temporal scales.

This presentation describes the High Resolution Plant Phenomics Centre's effort in designing and developing cutting edge phenotyping platforms and computational pipelines to automatically analyse and extract biological information at organ, plant or canopy scale. We will give some perspectives on the role of modelling and data assimilation approaches for maximizing the useful information extracted from these phenotyping platforms, in particular when it comes to identifying new target traits for improved RUE in cereals.