High Throughput Phenotyping in the Field to Enable the Development of Bioenergy Crops.

There is an urgent need to accelerate energy crop development for the production of renewable transportation fuels from biomass. Recent technological advancements have now made it possible to extract massive volumes of genetic, physiological, and environmental data from certain crops.  Building upon precision agriculture innovations and data-intensive computational approaches, the ARPA-E Transportation Energy Resources from Renewable Agriculture (TERRA) program will accelerate plant breeding, using robust high-throughput precision phenotyping systems, to quantify important agronomic traits in the field throughout the entire lifecycle of an individual plant, and to associate these traits with their genetic and genomic properties.  TERRA is focused on energy sorghum as a target crop, and will provide breeders with the ability to predict yield gains early, specifically, to identify which genes can improve carbon capture efficiency in newly cultivated bioenergy crops.