Genetic Analysis of Crop Lodging in CIMMYT Wheat Using Uav Based High-Throughput Phenotyping.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles or UAVs based phenotyping have recently gained significant interest in plant breeding due to the potential it offers in terms of precision high-througput analysis of a large number of plots. The superior temporal and spectral resolution can provide greater insights into the genetic architecture of complex traits and achieve higher genetic gains for key breeding traits. Here, we propose a UAV based semi-automatic image processing pipeline to analyze large number of wheat breeding plots. The image data was collected from CIMMYT's advanced spring wheat nurseries. Image datasets were processed with our in-house designed processing pipeline to extract plant height, lodging and vegetation index data. Two different lodging assessment strategies were evaluated and compared with the visual scores of lodging. The genome-wide analysis and prediction results on lodging will be discussed. The integration of these quality phenotyping traits will accelerate the genetic gains in wheat breeding programs.