Integrated Phenotyping Concepts and News from Emphasis - the European Infrastructure for Multi-Site Plant Phenotypingand Simulation for Food Security in a Changing Climate

Plant phenotyping is a essential tool for many applications ranging from functional genomics, to (pre-)breeding, breeding and analysis of biodiversity. It develops rapidly into a bottleneck for progress in basic and applied research. Lack of adequate solutions for quantitative analysis of plant architecture and function as well as their interaction with the dynamic and heterogeneous environment hampers progress in basic sciences as well as in breeding-related research. In recent years significant interdisciplinary approaches have been started to overcome this “phenotyping bottleneck”. Techniques were developed to quantify the dynamics and the heterogeneity of plant structure and function as well as of environmental cues. In this presentation we will explain recent results from the phenotyping chain approach, by which we study the relevance of phenotyping technologies at various scales from the lab to the field in direct experimental approaches and from meta-analysis. The integration of different scales is also a central element of EMPHASIS: the new pan-European for Multi-Site Plant Phenotyping And Simulation for Food Security in a Changing Climate, which is developing on the basis of the portfolio of existing national plant phenotyping centers in Europe. Here we will discuss the recent developments since EMPHASIS has been established as a ESFRI project.