EGU meeting: Vienna | Austria | 813 April 2018
https://egu2018.eu/registration.html
BG2.6 Plant Phenotyping for Food Security: Plant Productivity Assessment under Diverse Environmental Scenarios across Scales from Leaf to Field
Convener: Roland Pieruschka
Co-Conveners: Sven Fahrner , Ulrich Schurr
Abstract submission
Sustainable food security and increasing availability of plant biomass for human nutrition and bioindustries is the key challenge for the coming decades. Plant breeding is an essential component to achieve this goal. Innovative plant phenotyping has developed novel non-invasive, often image-based, technologies to quantify structural and functional plant characteristics. The aim is to identify robust relationships between genotype and gene expression to increase plant production and yield, to improve crop efficiencies and resistance to stresses, as well as develop biomass as renewable resource and bioenergy applications. The challenge is the quantification of structure, function and quality of plants interacting with the environment across scales from leaf to field, in growth chambers and greenhouse using non-invasive technology in automated system, across vast agricultural fields using field vehicles and UAVs, as well as aircrafts and satellites. For the purpose of breeding this requires high-throughput analysis and data handling.
Within Europe, the ESFRI-project EMPHASIS aims to integrate and further advance the plant phenotyping infrastructure and enable access to a diverse user community to analyse genotype performance in diverse environments and quantify the diversity of characteristics. EMPHASIS infrastructure includes: i) facilities for high resolution, high throughput phenotyping under controlled conditions, ii) semi-controlled field systems for high throughput phenotyping, iii) network of practical field sites across environmental gradients, iv) modelling platforms for improving phenotypic processes and for testing existing or virtual combinations of alleles in a variety of climatic scenarios and management practices and, v) data management and e-infrastructure. The session will bridge different research efforts and techniques across a range of scales and will attract a multidisciplinary community addressing challenges and solutions in identification of optical plant characteristics across scales using diverse techniques.
