- Phenotyping for climate change adaptation (heat, drought, salinity etc)
- Abiotic stress phenotyping
- Phenotyping for resource use efficiency (water use, nitrogen use, P-use etc)
- Phenotyping for photosynthetic traits/efficiency (in- & ex-field)
- Carbon & nutrient dynamics & root phenotyping
- Seed & plant organ development
- Phenotyping the soil microbiome / biostimulants
- Phenotyping for biotic stresses, plant diseases and disease resistance
- Phenotyping supported modelling / process-based modelling (e.g. Digital Twins)
- Phenotyping for future-proofing specific food crops (lab to field, breeding)
- Phenotyping crops for non-food purposes (ornamentals, forests, feed, fibres)
- Specialty crops & Horticulture
- Development of new sensor technology
- Image based sensors & phenotyping
- Non-image-based phenotyping
- Advances in robotics & vectors/ sensor carriers
- Affordable phenotyping approaches
- Advancements in data analyses for phenotyping: Statistical modelling & methods
- Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning
- FAIR data / metadata / databases / ontologies / standards / harmonization
7th International Plant Phenotyping Symposium
Scientific sessions and topics:
1) Climate change & Photosynthesis
Keynote: Stephen P. Long
(University of Illinois, United States of America)
Steve Long FRS holds the Ikenberry Chair of Crop Sciences His research concerns bioengineering of photosynthesis toward gaining sustainable increases in crop yield potential and adaptation to global change. He is Director of the multinational Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation RIPE Project which has developed and is developing these technologies for increased photosynthetic efficiency in crops for sustainable yield increases, under climate change. His mathematically guided engineering of photosynthesis led in November 2016 to a demonstrated on farm 20% increase in crop productivity. This year his lab also demonstrated the first single gene manipulation that resulted in a 15% increase in crop water use efficiency in the field. He is Founding and Cheif Editor of the journals Global Change Biology, GCB Bioenergy, and in silico Plants. He bas been listed by Thomson-Reuters/Clarivate as one of the most highly cited authors on Plant & Animal Biology in every year since 2006, elected Fellow of the Royal Society (2013) and elected Member of the National Academy of Sciences USA (2019).
Session topics include:
2) Plant Development & Allocation
Keynote: Tracy Lawson
(University of Essex, United Kingdom)
Professor Tracy Lawson is a professor in the Plant Productivity group and Director of Plant Phenotyping at Essex, with over 25 years’ experience in photosynthesis research. She obtained her first degree in Applied Biology in 1993 from Liverpool and PhD from Dundee in 1997. Her research focuses on the stomatal control of atmospheric gas entry into the leaf, associated water loss and the mechanisms that regulate this process. Recent research has paid particular attention to stomatal kinetics and the impact of dynamic environments on both photosynthesis and stomatal behaviour. Tracy’s work also concentrates on phenotyping including chlorophyll fluorescence techniques (for quantifying light use and photosynthetic efficiency) and thermal imaging (for measuring stomatal responses and kinetics). Lawson’s lab developed the first imaging system for screening plant water-use-efficiency (McAusland et al., 2013).
Session topics include:
3) Microbiome, ecology & biotic interactions
Keynote: Gert Kema
(Wageningen University & Research, Netherlands)
Gerrit H.J. Kema (21.12.1957) is professor of (tropical) phytopathology and head of the Laboratory of Phytopathology of Wageningen University, The Netherlands. He obtained a BSc degree in agronomy, a MSc in plant breeding and PhD in phytopathology. He has 40 years of experience in plant pathology and his research focus has been on host and pathogen genetics and genomics, currently specializing on foliar and vascular diseases of tropical perennial crops, primarily banana. He published over 120 peer reviewed scientific articles, advised numerous BSc, MSc and PhD students and coordinated major international research projects funded by The Royal Netherlands Society of Arts and Sciences with Indonesia, the Dutch Facility for Sustainable Entrepreneurship and Food Security with the Philippines, the Wageningen INREF program with partners in Uganda, Colombia, Ecuador, the Philippines, Costa Rica. He is one of the initiators of the Global Alliance Against TR4, https://iica.int/en/global-alliance and a member of the World Banana Forum, http://www.fao.org/world-banana-forum/about-the-forum/en/. He is currently involved in the ABBB project, https://breedingbetterbananas.org, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in Tanzania on banana breeding. He is a serial entrepreneur and co-founder of several companies in the field of bioprocessing and production, protection and genetic improvement of banana. Together with Prof. André Drenth, Queensland University, he is an editor of a book series on the sustainable cultivation of banana, https://shop.bdspublishing.com/store/bds.
Session topics include:
4) Modelling of physiological & ecological processes
Keynote: Junqi Zhu
(New Zealand Institute for Plant and Food Research Limited, New Zealand)
Dr. Zhu develops system models at different levels to study the effects of environmental conditions and plant architecture on yield and fruit quality of grapevine and apple by integrating whole-plant water and carbohydrate fluxes with fruit growth. His current research focuses on developing a digital twin of a perennial tree crop food system that will allow us to holistically simulate and design the structure, function and performance of the food systems across the value chain.
Session topics include:
5) Food & Bio-economy
Keynote: Lee Hickey
(University of Queensland, Australia)
Associate Professor Lee Hickey is a crop geneticist within the Queensland Alliance for Agriculture and Food Innovation at The University of Queensland, Australia. He leads a diverse research team that specialises in plant breeding innovation with a focus on understanding the genetics of above- and below-ground traits that underpin drought adaptation. The Hickey Lab research program spans from lab to field, where designer plant materials are created through speed breeding or engineered in the lab using genome editing, and then evaluated under controlled and field environments using state-of-the-art UAV phenotyping technology. Lee is passionate about training the next generation of crop scientists and currently mentors 13 PhD students, while 12 of his previous graduates now work for leading plant breeding companies and high-profile research institutes around the globe.
Session topics include:
6) Sensors, Robotics & Automation (technology session)
Keynote: Cyrill Stachniss
(University Bonn, Germany)
Cyrill Stachniss is a full professor at the University of Bonn and heads the Photogrammetry and Robotics Lab. He is additionally a Visiting Professor in Engineering at the University of Oxford. Before his appointment in Bonn, he was with the University of Freiburg and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. Since 2010 a Microsoft Research Faculty Fellow and received the IEEE RAS Early Career Award in 2013. From 2015-2019, he was senior editor for the IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters. Together with his colleague Heiner Kuhlmann, he is a spokesperson of the DFG Cluster of Excellence "PhenoRob" at the University of Bonn. In his research, he focuses on probabilistic techniques for mobile robotics, perception, and navigation. The main application areas of his research are autonomous service robots, agricultural robotics, and self-driving cars. He has co-authored over 250 publications, has won several best paper awards, and has coordinated multiple large research projects on the national and European level.
Session topics include:
7) Informatics, Data & Analytics
Keynote: Emilie Millet
(INRAe, France)
As a quantitative biologist with an initial training as an agronomist, Dr. Emille Millet's activities focus on the integration of methods and data at different scales in order to identify the determinisms of quantitative plant responses to environmental conditions.
After a PhD thesis at LEPSE (MAGE 2012-2016) in the framework of the DROPS and Amaizing projects, she did a first post-doc at Wageningen University (WUR, the Netherlands) in the EPPN2020 project.
She joined the MAGE team again in July 2021 as a Post Agreenskills postdoc. In the EXPOSE project (EXploring PhenOtypic SpacE for Mining Genotypes and Alleles in Maize), she proposes to interface genetics and ecophysiology with ecology/evolution and data science. The objective is to define G×E interactions in terms of phenotypic space and to study their structure. The use of variables measured in platforms, which are predictive of the response of plants to the environment, will make it possible to identify combinations of traits and individuals adapted to specific conditions. She is currently researcher at the INRAE group Genetics and Breeding of fruit and vegetables (GAFL) in Avignon, France, working on tomato breeding. Her primary research interest focuses on integration of methods and data at different scales to identify the determinisms of plant responses to change in climate.
Session topics include:
Jointly organized by:
