About this Session

USING ULTRA-HIGH-RESOLUTION DRONE IMAGERY FOR CROP BREEDING HIGH THROUGHPUT PHENOTYPING

Presented by: Dr. Kevin Price, Geospatial Data & Analysis Consultant

Presented by: Don Cummins, President, Air Data Solutions, LLC

“The essence of biology is to understand the link between genotypic and physical (phenotypic) characteristics.  Reflecting this, the primary focus of plant genetics research since the discovery of DNA has been to understand how DNA polymorphisms impacts a plant’s phenotype.  Making this connection is central to plant biology, ecology, population genetics, and plant breeding.  To connect DNA to phenotypes on a genome-wide scale and understand the genetic architecture of complex traits on a species-wide level, large populations must be reliably phenotyped and genotyped. This level of biological understanding will greatly expand the field of plant biology while helping meet the challenges of increasing food, feed, and fiber production in the face of growing populations, decreasing land area and changes in climate.

The bottleneck to plant breeding is phenotyping.  For this reason, there is a need for robust, high-throughput phenotypic (HTP) methods for assaying a range of traits in crops within a field growing condition.  Remote sensing is the most promising approach for developing a low-cost, flexible methods amendable to a range of plant species” (Poland et al. 2012).

During this presentation, we will discuss how ultra-high-resolution color infrared imagery acquired from a drone aircraft is acquired and used by generic breeders to identify key plant growth characteristics of significance to plant breeding objectives.