Use Cases
Use Case 1: Validated sensors and methodology applicable for biotic stresses in wheat
UC1 will build on extended experience in fungal diseases and will deliver approaches for the quantification of wheat FHB with the potential to be transferred to various cereals for other ear diseases (e.g. reemerging diseases in relation to the decreasing of pesticides application) or for other leaf diseases (e.g viruses). It will create the connection between platforms and models for real time prediction of disease appearance for instance in precision agriculture. The UC will aim at addressing the spectral, spatial and time resolution needed to identify multiple diseases at different scales through a cereal trials network.
Use Case 2: Soil Health and Root Phenotyping: Innovative, automatable soil imaging techniques to determine key belowground parameters in real time at plot to landscape scale
UC2 will deliver an innovative approach for the in situ quantification of soil physico-chemical and root properties, which are often missing in agricultural and ecological applications or surveyed at coarse resolutions. It will utilize portable, high-performance near infrared (NIR) instruments, increasingly established as a rapid and cost-efficient laboratory technique, taking the technique from the laboratory to the field for fast, automatable on-site surveys of key soil parameters such as soil organic carbon.
Use Case 3: GxE cereals: Model-assisted wheat phenotyping to predict genotype performance and adaptation to future environmental conditions
The main aim of UC3 is to develop a new model-assisted phenotyping strategy to improve the knowledge on genotype-by-environment (GxE) interactions of wheat cultivars. In this new method, crop-process based models are used to identify functional traits through the assimilation of multi-sensor and multi-scale observation of different structural and morphological traits over a large environmental variability. This will entail observations of a wheat genetic panel over multiple environments and management conditions using EO and connected sensors to acquire observations on a network of fields across diverse agro-climatic conditions.
Use Case 4: UC4 GxE orchard: apple tree development, fruit and health status in contrasted environments
UC4 aims at assessing the apple tree developmental, physiological and health status in contrasting environments with abiotic and biotic stress for an optimum management of fruit quality. A dedicated set of sensors will be adapted to quantitatively monitor apple tree and fruit quality, growth and health status. The UC will use a European multi-site experimental design called « the Apple REFPOP » planted in 2016 following the same experimental design and including 534 genotypes on five locations representing various biogeographical regions in Europe. First attempts to phenotype this collection started already in the European project INVITE and will be intensified within PHENET.
Use Case 5: Farms 2 Platforms (F2P): phenotyping capabilities of RI to support innovation towards the agroecological transition at the farm level
The objective of UC5 is to demonstrate that small private actors can leverage on RI to draw scientifically supported conclusions on farmers’ innovations and that the field deployment of IoT based sensors and the coverage of EO products are key to the success. Within this network, Soil Capital has already assembled a database of field and farm management data of 600 farmers interested in soil carbon enrichment. In this UC, engineers at Soil Capital will co-develop data warehousing (with WP4) and analytical skills (with WP3) to complement the existing datasets with historical and current crop phenotype extracted from EO products. The resulting analysis will allow Soil Capital to identify promising innovations and to select sets of fields that are representative of environmental conditions and on which phenotyping efforts will be densified.
Use Case 6: Soil phenology: Climate change as driver of soil phenology
UC6 will assess temporal dynamics of soil biota and biochemical cycles (fluxes of carbon, nutrients, water), and impacts of climate change on soil processes by utilizing a network of closed ecosystem, allowing climate simulation (Ecotrons) and open platforms with experimental climate change. It will investigate dis-coordinated shifts between the temporal dynamics of biota, leading to disruption of soil carbon, water and nutrient cycles, with a knock-off effect on ecology of crops and natural vegetation, known as phenological ‘mismatch‘, yet hardly assessed in soil systems. The methods used in UC6 entail integrated sensing systems and analytical platforms providing highly resolved and real time information about plant-soil-microbial interactions, high-throughput imaging of roots and vegetation phenology, soil atmosphere gas exchange, soil water balance and evapotranspiration, and soil carbon, nutrient and water fluxes.
Use Case 7: Intercropping: Diversification in Arable Systems
Intercropping entails multiple benefits in comparison to sole cropping, e.g. higher land use efficiency, higher yield stability, higher resource use efficiency and reduced need for plant protection inputs, yet adoption rates are low in Europe. UC7 aims to make intercropping research more connected across multiple environments. This will be done by collecting and collating and structuring data, researchers and experimental sites (characterized by WP3 tools) in a centrally accessible point (WP4). Building on extensive data from past and ongoing intercropping research at University of Bonn and Wageningen University, it will create an open international platform for intercropping data from field experiments, making data and information accessible to a large and heterogeneous group of stakeholders.
Use Case 8: IoT & EO services in support to European landscape adaptation to climate change
UC8 gathers 2 European landscape test sites to demonstrate how the services of the European RI can address climatechange
related and complex questions such as forest dieback (France) and pollination (Germany) issues. The UC will implement novel IoT based devices [e.g. microclimate (above- and below-ground) to assess stresses - phenology and incoming light (cameras, NDVI and radiation sensors) - flower visiting insects (multiple cameras) – instrumented bumble bee colonies (scales, microphones, cameras to follow marked individuals) and light phenotyping tools (hand/back - motion photogrammetry and lidar) supported by WP2 , leverage on WP3 for up- and -down scaling proxy and remote sensing tools, and on WP5 for data assimilation into phenomenological and process-based models for simulation in order to (i) cope with environmental crisis management, and (ii) feed multi-criteria and multi-risk management decision tools.
