Kansas State University Receives Grant for UAS Research on Wheat Breeding
Kansas State University is set to receive a grant worth $975,000 to fund a project called “Wheat Yield Prediction and Advanced Selection Methodologies through Field-Based High-Throughput Phenotyping with UAVs.”
The project, which is funded through the National Institute of Food and Agriculture’s (NIFA) International Wheat Yield Partnership, will look into the role that UAS can play in producing better wheat varieties when breeding.
“The goal of this project is to deliver in-season yield predictions by building models that combine genetic information from DNA sequencing and crop physiology that we will gather from UAV measurements on tens of thousands of breeding lines,” said project director Jesse Poland, via the Tri-State Livestock News.
UAS will be used to collect images of fields and plants, to evaluate the conditions that fields are in and the health and ability of plants to yield. Those images will be used to build a phenotype of wheat varieties. A phenotype is a map of an organisms’ observable characteristics, and the effect that their environment has on those characteristics.
The phenotypes will help researchers determine the desired agronomic traits of wheat, and help give wheat breeders the most up to date information on their crop performance, and some insight into how to improve future varieties.
“If we can use new technologies like remote sensing with these low-cost UAVs, then we provide the breeders with the tools to look through many more candidate varieties and increase the chances of finding ones that are really excellent and can become the next best varieties to release to farmers,” Poland said.
Funding for the project started on November 1, 2016, and will last for three years.
