The development of crops with deeper roots holds substantial promise to mitigate the consequences of climate change. Deeper roots are an essential factor to improve water uptake as a way to enhance crop resilience to drought, to increase nitrogen capture, to reduce fertilizer inputs, and to increase carbon sequestration from the atmosphere to improve soil organic fertility. A major bottleneck to achieving these improvements is high-throughput phenotyping to quantify root phenotypes of field-grown roots. We address this bottleneck with Digital Imaging of Root Traits (DIRT)/3D, an image-based 3D root phenotyping platform, which measures 18 architecture traits from mature field-grown maize (Zea mays) root crowns.

The 2022 NAPPN Annual Conference is the largest meeting on plant phenotyping in North America and will be held in Athens, Georgia. The meeting will highlight the most recent interdisciplinary advances from biology, engineering, computer science, and mathematics in the rapidly developing field of Plant Phenotyping.