'High Throughput' Yield Components in Cotton.

The monitoring and quantifying of growth parameters of the cotton plant, provides crucial information that can lead to the identification of potential problems or opportunities for effective crop management. However, the collection and interpretation of these simple plant maps requires a lot of time and effort, even though, as shown by several studies, not whole plots need to be sampled.

Various techniques have been and continue to be used to collect data on the in-season and end of season measurements. In-season measures including height, total number of nodes, and nodes above white flower are some of the most common plant mapping methods. These measurements are essential towards estimation of the crop’s in-season growth and development and can be used to identify potential growth differences among cultivars under different growing conditions.

Boll yield components measurement constitutes an end of season plant mapping technique. The fraction of plants with a boll at a given fruiting site, i.e., node-by-node boll fraction is one of the most commonly used. Also common are, yield, percent lint, and fiber quality.

The trials used for evaluation are conducted under well-watered and water-limited conditions in replicated field experiments in Lubbock Texas, with trait measurements taken at different times on multiple days throughout the growing season.

The data collected is used to help us identify the differences in structural growth among different cultivars and how these differences affect, for example boll distribution.

Our goal is to understand and model the structural pattern of the different cultivars under varying environmental conditions and more specifically, how these interactions contribute to physiological, fiber quality, and agronomic traits differences.

The system is evaluated on fourteen cotton cultivars grown under seven irrigation levels.