G2F NIFA FACT Workshop: High Throughput, Field-based Phenotyping Technologies for the Genomes to Fields (G2F) Initiative

The U.S. has long played a leading role in developing advanced agricultural technology. We must continue to develop novel approaches to increase the production of food, fiber and fuel while protecting our natural resources and ensuring an economically vibrant agriculture sector. The Genomes to Fields (G2F) Initiative strives to take advantage of new technologies to improve the productivity and stability of maize. In particular, this initiative seeks to connect advances in our understanding of crop genomes with new robotics, high-throughput sensing technologies, and other data gathering devices to understand how plant traits are influenced by genetics and the environment with a long-term aim of developing crops that will exhibit sustainable enhanced productivity across diverse sets of environments and years.In January 2018, G2F hosted a meeting in Ames, Iowa to consider trajectories for research in field-based phenotyping and how best to support those trajectories, and informing USDA NIFA and other federal agencies of our findings and conclusions. For four years, a distributed network of G2F field sites and public-sector collaborators has been generating the data needed to develop predictive models. Generating a vibrant community of researchers from diverse disciplines including the breadth of the plant sciences (e.g., genetics, agronomy, physiology, modeling, and breeding), engineering, computational sciences, and climatology is critical to the full success of the initiative. Many topics were discussed over the course of the three-day workshop, but four themes emerged as areas ripe for focused effort in the coming years: (1) support for ongoing community experiments; (2) development and use of field sensors and plant imaging platforms, (3) creation of data management, sharing, and analytics platforms especially for making effective use of large scale image sets, and (4) engaging additional scientific disciplines in G2F and training the next generation of agricultural scientists. It was suggested that these topics were of interest to advance not only the goals of the G2F initiative, but also the field of predictive plant phenomics more generally. The group supported the idea to enhance coordination efforts across all four themes by designating and/or creating a number of (5) High-Intensity Phenotyping Sites (HIPS) where individualized research areas and local expertise could develop alongside intentional, coordinated linkages focused on advancing topics within the four shared themes. While community experiments are necessarily extensive, these HIPS experiments can be embedded within the G2F testing network and allow for more intensive investigation and development of predictive phenomics tools. Tools and learnings from the HIPS could then be deployed more broadly.