Abstract
Soybean is among the most important crops for food and feed production worldwide. Sustainable and local production in regions with marginal climates requires cold-adapted varieties that create high yield and protein content in a short vegetation period. Drone-based high-throughput field phenotyping methods allow monitoring the success and the developmental speed of genotypes in such target environments. This study exemplifies that such frequent and precise analyses of remotely sensed canopy growth traits can be used to derive the optimal genotype, a so-called ideotype, for a given mega-environment. For the case example of Switzerland, a country with a temperate oceanic climate, the results indicate that image-derived traits allow predicting yield and protein content from the dynamics of vegetative growth. Genotypes with early canopy cover produce high yield, whereas genotypes that show a prolonged duration until they have reached their final maximum of leaf area index are characterized by a high protein content. Analyses of early performance trial stage material indicate that there are genotypes that combine both features of growth dynamics. Whether these genotypes are then indeed successful in breeding programs remains to be investigated, since this also depends on disease resistance and other traits of those genotypes. Yet, overall, this study provides strong indications of the high value of high-throughput field phenotyping in the context of physiological and breeding-related analyses of crops.
Highlights
World nutrition is dominated by monocotyledonous crops such as maize, wheat and rice
Fitting P-splines to time series resulted in growth curves that visually smoothed out small measurement errors
leaf area index (LAI) time series based on gap fraction theory exhibited stronger fluctuations than Canopy cover (CC) estimations (Fig. 3c) and a less pronounced plateau phase
Summary
World nutrition is dominated by monocotyledonous crops such as maize, wheat and rice. Soybean is among the most important dicotyle donous, broad-leaved crops. The structure of its canopy determines its success for radiation perception to a strong extent (Long et al, 2006), which in turn affects yield. It is unclear yet, whether the speed with which the canopy is set up determines the physiology of yield. The development of the canopy is progressing at extreme speed in early maturing varieties, that have been bred in recent decades for compar atively cold mega-environments, such as in Europe (Borra-Serrano et al, 2020). Analyzing the interaction of sink-source-transitions and of can opy development in such genotypes is very promising, as it may allow deciphering connections between the formation of yield and protein content (Long et al, 2006; Koester et al, 2014; Yuan et al, 2019; Wang et al, 2020)
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