At AREI Stende Research Centre the field trials including spring wheat genotypes originated from Baltic States and Norway were established. Sowing in this year was done on April 25-26. Phenotyping of important agronomic traits will be carried out throughout growing season.

Implementing low-cost high throughput plant phenotyping in Baltic wheat breeding.

Established field trials will be phenotyped by using UAVs fitted with RGB and multispectral cameras at weekly intervals during the growing season, from emergence to crop maturity in order to monitor crop growth and development and derive breeding-relevant traits.  Estimates obtained from UAV imaging will be compared to ground truth measurements in order to assess the accuracy of the high throughput phenotyping data. The first, starting flight was already done on May 2. 

Proximal imaging vehicle equipped with NDVI (modified RGB) and RGB cameras will be employed to phenotype plots for each spring wheat cultivar at three time points during the season starting from beginning of tillering (GS13) till early milk stage (GS73). Various Vegetation Indices and traits will be calculated: Canopy cover, Visible Atmospherically Resistant Index (VARI), Triangular Greenness Index (TGI), Senescence will be evaluated using RGB images. The normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) will be recorded from NDVI camera for retrieval of vegetation canopy biophysical properties.

At the moment, intensive work is underway on the statistical processing and interpretation of the data obtained from the two trial years in order to ensure the publicity of the planned results at the end of the project. From June 7 to 8, a meeting of the project's international partner team is planned at the AREI Stende research center to work together on the preparation of publications, to get acquainted with the field trials of the project in Stende.