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PERSPECTIVE article

Front. Plant Sci.
Sec. Technical Advances in Plant Science
Volume 15 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fpls.2024.1459670

Advances in Viticulture via Smart Phenotyping: Current Progress and Future Directions in Tackling Soil Copper Accumulation

Provisionally accepted
Youry Pii Youry Pii 1*Guido Orzes Guido Orzes 1,2Fabrizio Mazzetto Fabrizio Mazzetto 1,2Paolo Sambo Paolo Sambo 3Stefano Cesco Stefano Cesco 1
  • 1 Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Bolzano, Italy
  • 2 Competence Centre of Plant Health, Free University of Bozen/Bolzano, Bolzano, Italy
  • 3 Department of Agronomy, Food, Natural Resources, Animals and the Environment, School of Agricultural Sciences and Veterinary Medicine, University of Padua, Legnaro, Veneto, Italy

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Modern viticulture faces significant challenges including climate change and increasing crop diseases, necessitating sustainable solutions to reduce fungicide use and mitigate soil health risks, particularly from copper accumulation. Advances in plant phenomics are essential for evaluating and tracking phenotypic traits under environmental stress, aiding in selecting resilient vine varieties.However, current methods are limited, hindering effective integration with genomic data for breeding purposes. Remote sensing technologies provide efficient, non-destructive methods for measuring biophysical and biochemical traits of plants, offering detailed insights into their physiological and nutritional state, surpassing traditional methods.Smart phenotyping is essential for selecting crop varieties with desired traits, such as pathogenresilient vine varieties, tolerant to altered soil fertility including copper toxicity. Identifying plants with typical copper toxicity symptoms under high soil copper levels is straightforward, but it becomes complex with supra-optimal, already toxic, copper levels common in vineyard soils. This can induce multiple stress responses and interferes with nutrient acquisition, leading to ambiguous visual symptoms. Characterizing resilience to copper toxicity in vine plants via smart phenotyping is feasible by relating smart data with physiological assessments, supported by trained professionals who can identify primary stressors. However, complexities increase with more data sources and uncertainties in symptom interpretations. This suggests that artificial intelligence could be valuable in enhancing decision support in viticulture. While smart technologies, powered by artificial intelligence, provide significant benefits in evaluating traits and response times, the uncertainties in interpreting complex symptoms (e.g., copper toxicity) still highlight the need for human oversight in making final decisions.

    Keywords: viticulture, Cu toxicity, smart phenotyping, DATA FUSION, artificial intelligence

    Received: 04 Jul 2024; Accepted: 14 Oct 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Pii, Orzes, Mazzetto, Sambo and Cesco. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Youry Pii, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Bolzano, Italy

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.