Abstract
Food scarcity, population growth, and global climate change have propelled crop yield growth driven by high-throughput phenotyping into the era of big data. However, access to large-scale phenotypic data has now become a critical barrier that phenomics urgently must overcome. Fortunately, the high-throughput plant phenotyping platform (HT3P), employing advanced sensors and data collection systems, can take full advantage of non-destructive and high-throughput methods to monitor, quantify, and evaluate specific phenotypes for large-scale agricultural experiments, and it can effectively perform phenotypic tasks that traditional phenotyping could not do. In this way, HT3Ps are novel and powerful tools, for which various commercial, customized, and even self-developed ones have been recently introduced in rising numbers. Here, we review these HT3Ps in nearly 7 years from greenhouses and growth chambers to the field, and from ground-based proximal phenotyping to aerial large-scale remote sensing. Platform configurations, novelties, operating modes, current developments, as well the strengths and weaknesses of diverse types of HT3Ps are thoroughly and clearly described. Then, miscellaneous combinations of HT3Ps for comparative validation and comprehensive analysis are systematically present, for the first time. Finally, we consider current phenotypic challenges and provide fresh perspectives on future development trends of HT3Ps. This review aims to provide ideas, thoughts, and insights for the optimal selection, exploitation, and utilization of HT3Ps, and thereby pave the way to break through current phenotyping bottlenecks in botany.
Highlights
The growth and development of plants, involving their photosynthesis, transpiration, flowering, and fruiting processes, are the basis of life on earth, and support 7.5 billion people (Pieruschka and Schurr, 2019)
This paper reviewed the application of HT3Ps in the growth chamber or greenhouse with strictly controlled environmental conditions and field phenotyping with notoriously heterogeneous conditions and uncontrollable environmental factors
Robust phenotyping is central to plant breeding (Hickey et al, 2019), and the development of satisfying crop varieties with high-yielding and strong stress resistance is the ultimate goal of crop breeding
Summary
The growth and development of plants, involving their photosynthesis, transpiration, flowering, and fruiting processes, are the basis of life on earth, and support 7.5 billion people (Pieruschka and Schurr, 2019). The agriculture that sustains humanity is facing three stark challenges at once: climate change, resource depletion, and population growth (Kim, 2020). In the 30 years, the global population is expected to grow by 25% to 10 billion (Hickey et al, 2019). One of the greatest challenges in the twenty-first century will be to quickly expand crop production to meet this growing demand for food, clothing, and fuel. Salinization and erosion of agricultural land around the world, coupled to declining phosphate reserves, pose a grave threat to growth in the global production of crops. Highthroughput genotyping is expanding exponentially, the collection and processing of plant phenotypes constrain our ability to analyze the genetics of quantitative traits and limit the use of breeding for crop yield improvement (Mccouch et al, 2013)
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