Plants develop by a complex interaction of genotypes with the environments. The need to characterize the phenotype is essential to understand fundamental processes which determine the structure and function of plants in particular in times of climate change. While significant progress has been made in molecular methods in recent years and the genomes of several plants have been sequenced this knowledge is not sufficient to simulate the phenotype of a plant without knowing the history and the dynamic interaction of the plant with its environment. Thus, plant phenotyping - quantitative analysis of structure and function of plants - has become the major bottleneck and, quantitative information on genotype-environment relations is the key to address future challenges. Increasing the plant biomass production quantitatively and qualitatively can provide major contributions to grand challenges like food security on a global level, at the same time reducing a major driver for migration movements.
Beyond fostering scientific progress plant phenotyping requires a community effort. In this context EPPN2020, a EU funded project provides access to key plant phenotyping facilities in Europe while EMPHASIS, a ESFRI listed project aims at the development of a long term sustainable pan European plant phenotyping infrastructure that addresses the needs of the diverse users from academia and industry including the operation and development of a pan-European e-infrastructure to effectively collect, process and provide data for the community.
With this meeting we aim to provide:
- discussion about the relevance of agriculture for the perspective of politics, users, scientists
- overview of recent development for a long term operation of pan European plant phenotyping infrastructure, including information systems within the project EMPHASIS
- opportunities to enable access to key plant phenotyping facilities within the EPPN2020 project
- demonstrations of case studies that illustrate different aspects of plant phenotyping and its applications for breeding and basic plant science
opportunities for close interaction with phenotyping experts to discuss the needs and requirements for crop improvement
