PhenomUK - Crop Phenotyping: from Sensors to Knowledge

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Major improvements in crop performance are needed to keep pace with population growth, which is driving up global food demand, and climate change, which is increasing the vulnerability of cropping systems to extreme weather events in the UK and internationally. Whilst plant breeding efforts have greatly benefited from advances in genomics, profiling the crop phenome (i.e. the structure and function of plants) associated with their genetic structure and environment remains a major bottleneck. Solutions will be multidisciplinary, requiring engineering and computer science as well as plant biology. Sensors are required that can measure of a diverse range of properties of complex, deformable, living and growing objects - plants - often in quite hostile environments. Structural and functional plant traits capturing key properties of roots, shoots, flowers, seeds, etc. must be recovered from those measures effectively and efficiently. Most data capture is image-based, requiring advanced computer vision techniques. Trait data are then used to provide understanding of e.g. plants' growth rates, flowering times, seed production and yield, using advanced data analysis and machine learning methods.PhenomUK's vision is of an integrated, mutually-informed community of computer scientists, engineers and biologists, working together across discipline boundaries to shape the technologies needed to address one of the global challenges of the 21st century - the provision of a secure food supply to a growing population against a background of resource depletion and climate change. Through series of Annual Conferences, workshops, networking visits, online training events and pump-priming research projects, this multidisciplinary network project will:1. ensure that UK scientists have access to the innovative technological capabilities needed to drive world-leading basic discovery research in the plant, crop and agricultural sciences2. provide the deeper understanding of national plant phenotyping capabilities, needs and opportunities required to allow the UK to participate fully in and gain maximum benefit from international initiatives such as the pan-European infrastructure being created by the ESFRI EMPHASIS project (https://emphasis.plant-phenotyping.eu).