Photosynq a Rapid Measure of Plant, Soil, Water, and Environmental Parameters for Big Data Analyses Globally.

Nondestructive identification of abiotic and biotic interference of plant processes requires new technology designed to quantify plant physiological responses to their growing environment. The PhotosynQ project connects the MultispeQ instrument to a cloud-based database for global sharing of plant health data including drought. The MultispeQ is a sophisticated, inexpensive, and nondestructive plant photosynthesis meter that measures key chlorophyll fluorescence, absorbance and absorbance kinetics parameters. The MultispeQ uses 15 second measurements of crop leaves to provide a ‘window’ into the plant, allowing researchers to identify plant water deficit drought or to rapidly identify genotypes resilient and susceptible to drought stress in the field. The resulting data, and key metadata including GPS waypoints, timestamp, and survey style data collected from smartphones via Bluetooth connection to MultispeQ, are connected to the PhotosynQ platform (www.photosynq.org) facilitating the generation of large data sets useful to collaborators worldwide. These big data sets can be further analyzed for quantifying additional responses by plants. This new data-sharing tool advances farming research globally. In Zambia, local researchers used PhotosynQ to identify key QTL’s for drought tolerance in a common bean breeding population. In Uganda, researchers quantified plant water deficit drought in cowpea lines using the quantum yields of photosystem II and non-photochemical quenching. In Michigan, we deployed PhotosynQ to identify the leaf locations on corn plants experiencing plant water deficit stress at various growth stages, with and without soil water retention technologies, and to relate MultispeQ parameters to soil moisture content. Users can visualize and map data, aggregate results, and apply sophisticated analytical tools to take direct measurement of crop physiological status in the field. This device can be used to identify the frequency of measuring the same or different leaves of most row crops and vegetable crops to identify separate and combined abiotic and biotic stresses.