Imaging sensor solutions in the soft fruit industry for high throughput phenotyping and monitoring of abiotic and biotic stresses for premium variety production and maximised yields.

New crop varieties that can tolerate abiotic/biotic stresses are essential for maintaining crop productivity in current and future growing environments. Breeding stress-tolerant crop varieties, however, is limited by the precision and throughput of plant phenotyping. This project will develop and apply a novel tractor-mounted platform for precise and high throughput field phenotyping of plant stress responses of soft fruit crops using IRT and hyperspectral imaging. It is proposed also to assess the value of canopy imaging as an indirect indicator of abiotic and biotic root stresses. Soft fruit crops such as raspberry can experience multiple stresses in field conditions, including poor soil conditions, variable water availability, and attack by root rot pathogens and root-feeding vine weevil larvae. Phenotyping data will be linked to genetic markers to facilitate breeding of productive, stress-resistant soft fruit varieties. This novel high-throughput phenotyping platform will accelerate the development and release of productive high quality soft fruit varieties that perform well in sustainable reduced input cropping and is expected to be valuable for routine monitoring of crops and stress diagnosis.