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The following scientific domains are covered:

• Agricultural Sciences
• Natural Sciences
• Biological Sciences
• Material Sciences
• Engineering
• Chemistry
• Medical and Health Sciences
• Earth and Environmental Sciences
• Information Science and Technology
• Humanities and Social Sciences.

AgroServ enables access to 143 research installations across Europe for researchers from academia and the industry (physical, remote and virtual access). The installations can be used for experiments with scientific or scientific-technological objectives to answer basic and applied questions related to sustainable and resilient agriculture and agroecological transition.

Access is granted on the basis of scientific excellence to ensure feasibility of the projects and their scientific quality. The application to access our research facilities is a two-step process.

Learn more about the application procedure and send your pre-proposals before October 23rd, 2023, 12:00 am CEST here.

This Research Topic aims to collect selected contributions from attendees and members of the research community of IPPS 2022, the 7th International Plant Phenotyping Symposium, which was held in Wageningen, Netherlands (September 26-30 2022). Spontaneous submissions are also welcome. Submissions will be open following the conference.

Plants are a vital aspect of and a venue for addressing the challenges facing our planet. The need for renewable energy sources and a reliable food/feed supply as well as ways to manage resource and materials scarcity and climate change are among the challenges that we can address with plants. Integrating plant systems approaches, from molecular to organismal to field applications, is necessary to develop sustainable production with higher yields using limited land, water, and nutrients and to improve the characteristics required for the traditional and novel use of plants for the future.

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With this Special Issue we invite contribution that focus on the use of phenotyping approaches for the quantification of physiological traits under biotic and abiotic stress of crops under controlled and field conditions with the goal to understand basic plant environment interaction and translate this understanding into application in breeding or agronomy scenarios, as one of the key objectives on the way towards sustainable agriculture.

Submission deadline: 31 July 2023

Guest Editors

Forschungszentrum Jülich GmbH
Institut für Bio- und Geowissenschaften (IBG)/ Pflanzenwissenschaften (IBG-2)

Prof. Dr. Ulrich Schurr
Prof. Dr. Uwe Rascher
Dr. Sven Fahrner
Dr. Roland Pieruschka

Useful Links
Call-for-paper
Submission website
Guide for authors

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Access the public consultation

To that end, EMPHASIS-GO will (1) develop and deploy services, (2) implement the legal, financial and organisational framework and (3) consolidate the business plan for the Operational Phase.

EMPHASIS-GO brings together 13 leading plant phenotyping institutions from eleven countries. It is a 36 months project funded with ~ 1.3 million euros by the European Union (Grant agreement ID: 101079772)

In PHENET, the European Research Infrastructures (RI) on plant phenotyping (EMPHASIS), ecosystems experimentation (AnaEE), long-term observation (eLTER) and data management and bioinformatics (ELIXIR) will join their forces to co-develop, with a diversity of innovative companies, new tools and methods – meant to contribute to new RI services – for the identification of future-proofed combinations of species, genotypes and management practices in front of the most likely climatic scenarios across Europe.

Ambitioning to go beyond current highly instrumented but often spatially and temporally limited RI installations, PHENET derived services will allow wide access to enlarged sources of in-situ phenotypic and environmental data thanks to (i) new AI-based multi (agroecology-related) traits multi-sensors devices (ii) to unleashed access to high resolution Earth Observation data connected to ground based data, (iii) FAIR data support for connection with (iv) new generation of predictive modelling solutions encompassing AI and digital twins. Developments will be challenged by and implemented in a series of eight Use Cases covering a large range of agroecosystems but also of ecosystems to demonstrate portability of solutions. Several of these Use Cases will mobilize on-farm data.

A large effort will be devoted to training RI staff and beyond through a sustained collection of training material fed by experts. Outreaching activities will aim at enlarging the range of RI users. PHENET will not only strengthen RI but will also have major impact on the development of innovative companies on phenotyping, envirotyping and precision agriculture as well as on the emergence of climate smart crop varieties and innovative practices fitted to climate change and agroecological transition.

This new title also details the use of plant phenotyping to analyse traits such as crop root functionality, yield performance and disease resistance.

Find out more about the new title here.

*Special Offer*

Receive 20% off your order of the book using code EMP20 via the BDS Website. Please note that this discount code expires 31^st July 2022.

Furthermore, even though modern AI-based methods typically generalize well to unseen data, no standard exists to enable sharing and fine-tuning of pre-trained models between different analysis tools. Existing user-facing platforms operate entirely independently from each other, often failing to comply with FAIR data and Open Science standards. The field of AI and ML is developing at a staggering pace, making it impossible for the non-specialist to stay up to date.

To enable the life science communities to benefit from AI/ML-powered image analysis methods, AI4LIFE will build bridges, providing urgently needed services on the common European research infrastructures. The project builds an open, accessible, community-driven repository of FAIR pre-trained AI models and develops services to deliver these models to life scientists, including those without substantial computational expertise. Direct support and ample training activities will prepare life scientists for responsible use of AI methods, while contributor services and open standards will drive community contributions of new models and interoperability between analysis tools. Open calls and public challenges will provide state-of-the-art solutions to yet unsolved image analysis problems in the life sciences.

The consortium brings together AI/ML researchers, developers of popular open source image analysis tools, providers of European-scale storage and compute services and European life sciences Research Infrastructures — all united behind the common goal to enable life scientists to fully benefit from the untapped but potentially tremendous power of AI-based analysis methods.

AgroServ, thanks to a large consortium of recognized European Research Infrastructures, features a vast offer of services at all scales, from the molecule, to the organism, to the ecosystem, and to the society. AgroServ goes beyond the state-of-the-art because it will allow users access, for the first time, to make use of a consistent, integrated, and customized offer of services from several RIs spanning all relevant disciplines: they will bring together several types of expertise, disciplines and technologies, integrating competences from chemists, biologists, agronomists, ecologists, bioengineers, analysts, sociologists, economists.

The transdisciplinary offer of services will have a high impact on the future of the food system, preserving biodiversity and reducing the impact of agriculture on climate. The consortium will work closely with partners from the society, farmers, industry, citizens and policy makers, through living labs and towards the establishment of evidence-based policy, and codeveloped practices in agriculture. By delivering a pan-European and inter/multidisciplinary data ecosystem, and providing state-of-the art services on agroecosystems, the project will society long-term capacity to respond to global challenges in the agriculture sector. It will also provide evidence-based policy making for a resilient and sustainable agricultural system and enable new discoveries and knowledge breakthroughs in the field of agroecology. Through user engagement and Living Lab activities, it will develop the agroecology research community, encourage cross-fertilisation and enable a wider sharing of knowledge.

The project is expected to start by the end of 2022.

Abstract

The realization of the full objectives of international policies targeting global food security and climate change mitigation, including the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals, the Paris Climate Agreement COP21 and the European Green Deal, requires that we (i) sustainably increase the yield, nutritional quality and biodiversity of major crop species, (ii) select climate-ready crops that are adapted to future weather dynamic and (iii) increase the resource use efficiency of crops for sustainably preserving natural resources. Ultimately, the grand challenge to be met by agriculture is to sustainably provide access to sufficient, nutritious and diverse food to a worldwide growing population, and to support the circular bio-based economy. Future-proofing our crops is an urgent issue and a challenging goal, involving a diversity of crop species in differing agricultural regimes and under multiple environmental drivers, providing versatile crop-breeding solutions within wider socio-economic-ecological systems. This goal can only be realized by a large-scale, international research cooperation. We call for international action and propose a pan-European research initiative, the CropBooster Program, to mobilize the European plant research community and interconnect it with the interdisciplinary expertise necessary to face the challenge. Link to paper

Harbinson et. al. (2021) Designing the Crops for the Future; The CropBooster Program (PDF)