Towards an integrated plant phenotyping – technology, data, community

Plant production is central in agriculture, food systems, and in bio-economy applications, which is essential to address future grand challenges related to growing population, climate change, scarcity of agricultural land and natural resources, loss of biodiversity etc. Integrated solutions and new technologies are needed to improve plant production, based on knowledge-driven innovation to the farming sector, agricultural and seed industries. Therein, the analysis of crop performance in high throughput with respect to structural properties, functional properties, composition and the plant interaction with the environment is key for the exploitation of crop genetic diversity required for the enhancement of plant productivity and progress in plant breeding and agricultural management. This requires substantial and concerted action to avoid costly parallel development of similar facilities but joint establishment and sharing of hardware and software solutions to increase the availability of phenotyping facilities for diverse users and address the phenotyping bottleneck on the national level in different countries, on European level and internationally.