Omics and Precision Agriculture (OPAL) Platform Enhancement - "Digital In-Field Phenotyping Vehicle"
Term: 1 year, beginning in 2021
Status: Ongoing
Funding Amount: $260,000
Lead Researcher(s): Dr. Andrew Sharpe (Global Institute for Food Security)
Funding Partners: Western Grains Research Foundation, Saskatchewan Canola Development Commission
Project Description
The enhanced production of food crops is required to feed a growing world population. Current breeding programs, therefore, focus on higher yields, yield protection, and production efficiency, and their success is measured by the rate of genetic gain.
Rapid genetic gain can be achieved by (1) increasing the size of the breeding population to enable stronger selection intensity, (2) greater selection accuracy, (3) the maintenance of adequate genetic variation, and (4) the acceleration of breeding cycles. Annual genetic yield gains in cereals are currently 0.5–1%, almost entirely due to conventional breeding approaches. Dynamic crop models enable us to predict the performance of genotypes in diverse environments and under different agronomic management regimes thereby offering the prospect of re-defining how expensive yield trials are managed to reduce costs. Furthermore, in-field digital image phenotyping will improve genetic gains by enabling phenotyping in larger breeding populations, thus improving the accuracy of selection by applying more reliable measures for plant growth, health, resilience, and yield.
The digital image platform enhances conventional approaches in which breeders adjudicate crop traits in the field, thus allowing rapid and unbiased assessments, and can be used as a key selection tool by plant breeders, geneticists, producers, and agronomists to optimize both plant breeding and crop management. The proposed ground-based platform will also allow the development of novel digital signatures that differentiate crop lines and help us to understand fundamental physiological processes in a changing environment. Such a platform can be deployed by the Global Institute for Food Security (GIFS) via the Omics and Precision Agriculture Laboratory (OPAL) to support the plant phenotyping programs of all end users (academic, industrial and government) in order to benefit Canadian agriculture.