Non-Destructive Methods for Monitoring Plant Health

By 2050 the world’s population will increase to 10 B, with 70% of the population expected to reside in cities. To feed the additional 2.5 B people, we need to produce 50% more food. Moreover, with rising living standards, there is demand for higher quality food. On the other hand, many challenges threaten our crop productivity. Climate change, reflected by increasing CO2 levels and temperature rises, has negatively impacted crop yields, which are further compromised by wild swings of weather and unpredictable but increasingly frequent attacks by pests and pathogens. Recent publications estimate that by 2050 a 2°C rise in average temperature above the pre-industrial level would reduce the yield of major crops by 10-18%. Warmer temperatures would also reduce the protein content of legumes and compromise the nutritional value of vegetables. The challenges to crop productivity are further exacerbated by the prediction that 12M ha of farmland might be lost over the next 30 years. The question of how to produce more and better-quality crops with diminishing arable land and increasing assaults by biotic and abiotic stressors is a major concern of plant scientists.

Precision agriculture has been proposed as a solution to mitigate the potential food insecurity issue. An important element of precision agriculture is to make available a set of species-agnostic tools that enable the continuous measurement of a plant’s phenotypic parameters throughout its growth cycle. In the last decade, with the active participation of chemists, physicists, engineers and material scientists, several non-invasive technologies have been developed to monitor and diagnose plant health in the lab. Already, some of these technologies have been successfully advanced and implemented in the field. These technologies would enable the possibility to diagnose plant health by non-invasive means before the emergence of visual symptoms so that remedial measures can be taken. In this Research Topic, the following suite of technologies will be covered:

• Hyperspectral reflectance as a proxy of photosynthetic rate, leaf temperature, water status, etc.
• Thermo IR imaging
• PET/CT
• NMR
• RGB
• Raman spectroscopy to profile metabolite changes.
• Nanosensors to detect hormones and signaling molecules.
• New materials for on-site detection of VOCs
• Conformable electrodes to measure electrical signals.
• Breathable nanogenerators
• Flexible and wearable humidity sensor to track plant respiration.