PhotosynQ: Community-driven plant phenotyping for understanding plant responses to climate change

To understand the impact of climate change on plant productivity and its effects on ecosystems and agriculture, we need to probe multiple plant phenotypes (performance) on many species under many conditions in in the field and relate it to key environmental metadata. To approach such a big data question, we need a phenotyping tools that accessible to a broad community of researchers, farmers, entrepreneurs and scientists. To meet this need, we developed the PhotosynQ platform (www.photosynq.org). The platform is open-source and freely accessible to create a community of researchers that can make sophisticated geo-referenced measurements of key plant phenotypes and environmental conditions in the field, and share results and analyses to answer both local and global-scale scientific and agricultural questions. One component of the PhotosynQ platform is a hand-held sensor called “MultispeQ,” an inexpensive yet sophisticated field-deployable instrument capable of measuring several key plant properties and related environmental conditions. I will discuss recent results from a series of field trials in Africa and the U.S. that demonstrate how data acquired by MultispeQ can be wirelessly saved to the PhotosynQ platform’s cloud-based database and analyzed using big-data approaches, to provide early indicators of abiotic stress, crop yield and various (a)biotic stresses. I will then propose some approaches to using PhotosynQ to understanding the local and global effects of climate change on photosynthesis, and to aid in the development of climate resilient crops and agricultural management systems.