In-Field Uav Corn Phenotyping: A High Throughput Model.

Big data, precision agriculture, and high throughput plant phenotyping are all the latest areas of agricultural research and interest.  Ultimately, producers need information to make good decisions that improve their profitability, productivity and ideally both.  Agricultural research is taking place like it always has; however, the rate at which data is generated is increasing and the manner in which we gather information about hybrids, fertility, and various treatment combinations has changed with the introduction of UAV’s.  General agronomic trials examining planting densities, relative maturity and dry down, planting dates, and fertility treatments present opportunities for us to capture overhead images and discriminate among treatments in-season with a UAV platform.  Aerial image acquisition is not new with planes and satellites paving the way years ago.  UAV’s offer spatial, temporal, spectral and economic advantages that allow us to improve data capture.  Some Universities have concentrated on advanced greenhouse phenotyping while other locations have used boom trucks and a complicated system of wires and pulleys to suspend cameras above plots and collect images.  Our research group at Mississippi State is different because we have a UAV group dedicated to flying missions and processing data.  Once the data is collected and sufficiently processed we analyze it within ArcGIS and SAS to evaluate how well UAV spectral data correlated to ground-collected spectral and tissue samples.  Our first year of trials will be discussed.