Role of Virtual Plants in Digital Agriculture

Abstract

Virtual plants (VP) are computer-simulated three-dimensional (3D) models of plants or trees. One approach to create VPs is so-called functional-structural plant models (FSPM), which are used to model an accurate plant shape and architecture and combines it with physiological processes. Static or dynamic FSPMs are a well-established approach to serve as a versatile tool for predicting crop growth patterns in response to variations in environmental conditions. Using VP, crop growth can be simulated (in silico) rapidly compared to its natural growing season, which can take up to a few months or longer. Crop researchers and breeders employ in silico as an alternative to time-consuming, labor-intensive actual field trials to explore the focused growth of crops in specific environments and swiftly quantify essential attributes. This facilitates accelerate selective crop breeding, a promising strategy to address the impending challenge of food security. In VP modeling, first step is to select the study crop and decide on what traits to be examined, then set up a field experiment, gathering temporal data on crop growth, perform statistical analysis of this data to explore the relationship among various parameters, mathematical modeling to establish the growth rules for plant parameters. Finally, the computer simulation of FSPM is used to visualized the study crop at the level of individual stand or canopy. After getting the expected output, researchers can parameterize this model to generate different test scenarios. In-depth analysis of these test cases offers an ideal method to be used in evaluating the performance of the resultant test breed in terms of growth time, yield, resistance to biotic and abiotic stress, etc., as per application. This technique can potentially augment and expedite the existing high-performance plant phenotyping research by generating synthetic datasets to sort out the imbalance in the existing actual plant phenotyping datasets; however, it has a few challenges in its application. This chapter will cover the concept of VP modeling, its applications, and some challenges in its application.