High-Throughput Field Phenotyping to Advance Precision Agriculture and Enhance Genetic Gain, Volume II

Book excerpt: This Research Topic is part of the High-Throughput Field Phenotyping to Advance Precision Agriculture and Enhance Genetic Gain series. The discipline of “High Throughput Field Phenotyping” (HTFP) has gained momentum in the last decade. HTFP includes a wide range of disciplines such as plant science, agronomy, remote sensing, and genetics; as well as biochemistry, imaging, computation, agricultural engineering, and robotics. High throughput technologies have substantially increased our ability to monitor and quantify field experiments and breeding nurseries at multiple scales. HTFP technology can not only rapidly and cost-effectively replace tedious and subjective ratings in the field, but can also unlock the potential of new, latent phenotypes representing underlying biological function. These advances have also provided the ability to follow crop growth and development across seasons at high and previously inaccessible spatial and temporal resolutions. By combining these data with measurements of all environmental factors affecting plant growth and yield (“Envirotyping”), genotypic-specific reaction norms and phenotypic plasticity may be elucidated.