New technologies help plant breeders make a leap forward

By Jürgen Decloedt

12 July 2017

Imagine a field, where 10000 variaties are growing in tighly, regularly spaced plots. Welcome to the daily live of plant breeders. Plant breeders observe, record and analyze key features in these fields every day to produce the selection of next generation of varieties.

Untill recently, plant breeders would visit their experimental fields with pen and paper in order to acquire the necessary information. No need to explain it’s is a huge challenge to exclude human errors and obtain all information in a consistent and objective manner.
Let me explain to you how mapEO can add objectiveness and automation to these measurement campaigns by retrieving various kind or information through drone imagery.

It’s all about integrating image analytics into daily decision making

Drone uptake for regular monitoring in agriculture is limited, because drone flight endurance is short (10-20 minutes). But these short flights are just perfect for plant breeding plots. The images that are collected are so detailed that they can be used to generate current metrics automatically.
On top of that, these measurements provide unbiased and consistent information throughout the growing season

In the field of plant breeding, the drone nor the camera are the most important aspect. It’s all about the image analytics, how they relate to existing agrometrics and how well this new source of information can be integrated into your daily decision making.

MAPEO, a drone image processing tool

We’ve been collaborating intensively with plant breeders from all over the world to develop mapEO, a drone image processing service dedicated for experimental fields.

Thanks to mapEO, you can obtain agrometrics which reaches field based measurements about:

Plant height
Disease detection
Plant emergence
Bio mass
Plant cover
…

Want to know more about mapEO and what it can do for you? Feel free to contact us and we'll get you started.

Keeping the massive amounts of data useable

Although field sizes are rather limited, the resulting data is not. Counting emerging spinach plants for example requires a milimeter pixel resolution, which for a complete field can end up to 10 GB of data.
In order to process, access and use all this data correct and easy, you require specific infrastructure.

mapEO helps you as a plant breeders fully adopt and integrate drone technology and image processing techniques into your daily live.

You are able to:

derive agrometric statistics over a vegetation cycle
analyse synergies with experiments all over the world
derive standards which make current drone flights still valuable in 5 years time

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