Por Jorge Marques da Silva (BioISI - Ciências ULisboa).
High-throughput plant phenotyping is one of the most pressing needs in order to speed up the plant breeding process, which is essential for dealing with climate change. A significant part of the need for plant phenotyping is and will progressively be felt in developing countries with limited financial resources, which has triggered the need to develop low-cost systems. Drought is already one of the main limitations to agricultural production and will tend to worsen in the future. Phenotyping plants for drought resistance is therefore crucial. Thanks to a collaboration between the departments of Physics, Computer Science and Plant Biology, we designed and produced a cost-effective plant phenotyping protoype based on image capture in different zones of the electromagnetic spectrum and produced the software to control the equipment and process the captured images. In this communication, we will describe the platform in detail, identify the problems encountered in its design and production and indicate the costs associated with its construction. Results from tests made to assess the accuracy of the digital leaf ares estimated by the prototype are presented. Some causes of error and possible corrections are disclosed and discussed.
