Plant Phenotyping Survey completed: Data available on Zenodo (for free)!

3 New IPPN Members: Zhejiang University; NARO; InoviaFlow

IPPN is very happy to welcome three new IPPN members, which were admitted by the IPPN Board in Q2 2021: 

Zhejiang University (ZJU) is one of China’s top higher education institutions, as well as one of its oldest; its roots can be traced back to 1897 and the founding of the Qiushi Academy.

Located in Hangzhou – one of China’s most picturesque cities – the University is organized across seven faculties and 37 schools. It is home to 3,941 full-time faculty members, including 50 members of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Engineering.

Prof. Haiyan Cen will be ZJU's representative for IPPN. Her research focuses around:

• The investigation of complex light interactions with plant materials to provide a fundamental guidance of developing new optical sensing technologies across the area of agriculture and food.

• The development of high-throughput plant phenotyping systems from greenhouse to open-field based on hyperspectral imaging, three-dimensional imaging, and chlorophyll fluorescence imaging

• Machine learning and mechanistic modeling for improving big phenotypic data processes

The National Agriculture and Food Research Organization (NARO) is the core institute in Japan for conducting research and development on agriculture and food. "Our overall mission is to contribute to the development of society through innovations in agriculture and food, by promoting pioneering and fundamental R&D. We conduct technological development to make agriculture a competitive and attractive industry, and contribute to increasing the nation's food self-sufficiency rate."

In recent years, NARO has been developing various phenotyping systems to promote smart-agriculture and breeding. One of NARO's primary objectives within IPPN is to promote exchange with other IPPN member institutions & develop them into future collaborative research. This intention follows up on previous, already very successfull collaborations, like the one between NARO & WUR.

NARO's phenotyping focus lies in applying UAV and image technologies to diagnose plant growth & to select breeding lines. In the lab, NARO is developing high-throughput, non-destructive image-analysis platforms for root system architecture using X-ray CT.

NARO's IPPN represenbtative is Dr. Masao ISHIMOTO, Division Director at the Basic Research Institute of Crop Science within NARO.

InoviaFlow is a France-based company specializing in the developemnt of high-throughput phenotyping systems for roots, best-known for phenotyping technologies like Rhizotube & Rhizocab. These technologies have been well applied within InoviaFlow's work together withDr. Christophe Salon (INRAe) on the high-throughput phenotyping facility “4PMI” in Dijon. The IPPN webinar series PhenomicsWebinars recently featured Christophe's work in its April issue.

InoviaFlow is working together with prominent distributors like Qubit Systems (CAN), Phenoware (FR) & PhenoTrait (PRC). 

Christophe Baussart on his behalf CEO of InoviaFlow is aiming to extend their businesses through being close to the IPPN community & being able to interact, discuss & listen to the demands of researchers & applicationists within plant phenotyping.

UPCOMING

CONFERENCES

State-of-the-Art Tools & Approaches in Plant Phenotyping (ECOBREED),24 - 25th May 2021

The aim of the training program is to introduce and present to the young researchers, breeders, and farmers and policy makers the benefits of the use of improved phenotyping. During the training, participants will gain new knowledge from applied and basic research on phenotyping and the necessary skills to improve the selection and breeding of organic crops and contribute to the transfer of technologies developed into commercial practice. The ambition of the educational program will be the implementation of an experiment using high throughput phenotyping methods, which is currently one of the limiting factors in the genetic and physiological analysis of plants. This online workshop is organised by Horizon 2020 project ECOBREED and implemented by NPPC and PSI. Registration is mandatory, link will be forwarded to the registered participants.

Program & Registration

Virtual Meeting: “Root Biology Never Sleeps”, May 24th - 28th 2021;Sponsored by IPPN

Due to the ongoing effects of the pandemic on travel, the previously announced collaboration between ISRR11 and ROOTING2021 will now be a joint, entirely virtual meeting – “Root Biology Never Sleeps”. The joint meeting is being co-organized by the Interdisciplinary Plant Group at the University of Missouri, Columbia, USA, and the University of Nottingham, UK.

This joint meeting will bring together the global root research community to foster exchange and discuss new discoveries, developments, and challenges in root biology. The meeting will address root research across different scales from the molecular- to the ecosystem-level in agricultural and natural systems.

Schedule & registration

Virtual conference: Plant Biology Europe, June 28th – July 1st 2021

"Plant biology is a blooming scientific area where novel developments continuously arise, opening new avenues of research and empowering innovation for agriculture and for food and non-food applications. In the frame of a well-established tradition of biennial congresses jointly organized by the Federation of European Societies of Plant Biology (FESPB) and the European Plant Science Organization (EPSO), the Plant Biology Europe (PBE) Congress was originally planned for June 2020 in Turin, Italy  but was postponed to the following year due to the Covid-19 pandemic. PBE2021 will be held online from 28 June to 1 July, 2021 with the support of the Turin organizing group. PBE2021 focuses on delivering the latest scientific developments in plant biology, following an inclusive approach where long-standing research sectors and novel breakthrough topics are showcased, including aspects of science policy and ethics, and fostering participation of young scientists. We warmly invite plant biology researchers from all over the world to contribute to a vibrant, successful, and health-safe Congress by presenting and discussing their work and results at PBE2021!"

Schedule & registration

Free Workshop (Virtual): Plant Feature Extraction from 3D Point Clouds, 1st July, 10:30 am - 3:30 pm (GMT)

3D imaging is increasingly being used in the context of crop imaging, driven in large part by the challenge of high throughput phenotyping (identification of effects on plant structure and function resulting from genotypic differences and environmental conditions). This workshop will focus upon the general challenge of feature extraction from 3D imaging such as point clouds, bringing together those working on challenges of this type in different applications, including crop imaging. The workshop will provide the opportunity to discover together how cutting edge computer vision approaches find application in crop imaging.

Specific topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

• generic methods for extraction of features from 3D imaging including deep learning

• advances in segmentation, tracking, detection, reconstruction and identification methods for 3D imaging which address unsolved plant phenotyping problems

• advances in feature extraction and related 3D imaging computer vision tasks which address challenges in other applications

More information

Society for Experimental Biology (SEB) Annual Conference 2021 (Virtual), 29th June – 8th July

The virtual conference is a spectacular setting for discussing the latest scientific developments and networking with your community of biologists.

Schedule & registration

Call for papers: CVPPA Workshop at the International Conference on Computer Vision  (ICCV) 2021; either (!) 11th, 16th or 17th October 2021 (TBA)

Following successful CVPPP workshops from recent years at ECCV, BMVC, ICCV, and CVPR, CVPPP this year is held in conjunction with ICCV 2021. In this seventh workshop we aim to expand the scope of CVPPP to include computer vision research in agriculture more broadly. To reflect this change we have renamed the workshop to CVPPA: Computer Vision in Plant Phenotyping and Agriculture. The goal of the workshop remains to extend the state of the art in computer vision for plant and crop applications.

Computer vision in agriculture problems tend to revolve around automation problems, such as automated detection of plant organs for automated weeding or harvest. The images are acquired in a variety of contexts: forests, fields, greenhouses or controlled environments, packing houses, etc. Since these definitions are quite broad, please contact the organizers if you are unsure about whether your submission is in the scope of the workshop.

Submission due (full paper or 1 page abstract): 16th July 2021
 
Notification of acceptance: 06th August 2021
 
Camera-ready (papers and abstracts): 17th August 2021

More information

Call for applications: International Summer School (Virtual): Agricultural Robotics, August 24th – 28th 2021

The International Summer School will take place online, consisting of workshops, pre-recorded video talks, discussions and networking events. The event will be realized via an online conferencing tool. The summer school is free of charge for all participants and presenters and will be taught in English. Target groups are advanced master’s students (second year) & early doctoral students (first year). All nationalities are welcome!

In the context of the Summer School, these topics will be addressed and worked on in separate workshops:

• Introduction to Machine Learning

• Deep Learning for Applied Image Classification

• Basics of Graph-based Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM)

• Crop Phenotyping for Increased Sustainability

• A Practical Tutorial in Robot Perception and Control

• Analyzing Temporal Visual Data and Forecasting

• Economics of Robotics and Sensing Applications in Agriculture