Phenosense: distributed sensing platform for tropical crop phenotyping

Phenomics aims at measuring different traits of organisms, at different ontogenetic levels and under different environments. It concerns the application and development of tools for the discovery of such traits. In the development of crops, breeders use it to satisfy the growing demand of high yielding and stable varieties. Despite enormous knowledge in plant phenotyping at CIAT, progress in applying a phenomics approach in large breeding populations or diversity panels has been slowed down by three aspects: 1) Constraints in field phenotyping capability and environmental characterization, 2) the costs of conventional technologies, person-to-person and person-to-computer communications; and 3) analysis of gathered data. However, relentless advances of micro-electronics, wireless technologies and sensors capable to perceive the physical world makes possible to develop cheap and yet, reliable systems that could be used for recording nondestructively plants traits and the environmental conditions where they grow, whilst transmitting such information on real time. This will allow to accelerate the identification of promising genotypes, to increase the amount of molecular markers and the detection of candidate genes. Here, we propose a collaborative effort between plant scientists (CIAT) and experts in active/passive sensors, distributed systems and big-data processing technologies (Pontificia Universidad Javeriana PUJ) for the development of a phenomics platform (Pheno-SENSE) that allows greater throughput of phenotypic data (both for gathering and analysis) of CIAT’s mandate crops under field conditions, yet it is reliable, scalable and cost-effective.