What makes a crop ready for tomorrow?
Context
To address the challenges posed by climate change and population growth, innovative approaches that allow identifying superior plant varieties and more sustainable management options are crucial. Plant phenotyping, the study of plant traits using advanced imaging tools, is a groundbreaking field that drives plant research and crop breeding.
EMPHASIS-Belgium, the Belgian node for the distributed plant phenotyping infrastructure EMPHASIS, fosters collaboration among phenotyping installations, coordinates initiatives, and provides high-quality access to state-of-the-art platforms at the Belgian level.
EMPHASIS-Belgium is sponsored by FWO (Research Foundation Flanders) and coordinated by the following partners:
- VIB-UGent Center for Plant Systems Biology (PSB)
- VIB Agro-Incubator
- ILVO (Flanders Research Institute for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food)
- VITO
Objectives
Within EMPHASIS-Belgium, VITO expands its digital infrastructure for supporting a climate resilient plant breeding sector, by consolidating its MAPEO service platform, the state-of-the-art for drone image processing tools, and introducing CLIMTAG into the European plant breeding environment.
CLIMTAG is expanded to five European pilot countries (Belgium, Germany, France, Italy, and Portugal) and its indicators and dashboard are adapted to the European context. Furthermore, to increase access to FAIR data, the CLIMTAG data is made available in the openEO platform, which offers standardized interface for easy access and processing of EO data within the Copernicus Data Space Ecosystem.
Highlights
- The CLIMTAG tool is expanded to Europe. Five pilot countries are now available in the tool: France, Germany, Belgium, Italy, and Portugal.
- CLIMTAG's detailed data is also made available in the openEO platform. Users can easily create new workflows to apply CLIMTAG’s downscaled and bias-corrected agri-climate datasets in their phenotyping data analytics.
- The project explores relevant phenotyping applications with public and private sector partners: plant breeding experts can integrate historical climate and climate change information into their phenotype analysis and identify plant traits that are more suited for the climatic conditions of the future, supporting the development of climate-resilient varieties.
- The infrastructure development is followed by user demonstrations and a pilot period of two years to promote use-case applications, collect user feedback, and tailor the service to the users' needs.
Facts
Duration: January 2025 – December 2028
Funded by: FWO (Research Foundation Flanders)
Implemented by:
- VIB-UGent Center for Plant Systems Biology (PSB)
- VIB Agro-Incubator
- ILVO (Flanders Research Institute for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food)
- VITO
