Phenotyping Peanut Drought Stress with Aerial Remote-Sensing and Crop Index Data

Maria Balota (), Sayantan Sarkar, Rebecca S. Bennett and Mark D. Burow
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Maria Balota: Tidewater Agricultural Research and Extension Center, School of Plant and Environmental Sciences, Virginia Tech, Suffolk, VA 23437, USA
Sayantan Sarkar: Blackland Research and Extension Center, Texas A&M AgriLife Research, Temple, TX 76502, USA
Rebecca S. Bennett: United State Department of Agriculture-Agricultural Research Service, Stillwater, OK 74075, USA
Mark D. Burow: Texas A&M AgriLife Research, Lubbock, TX 79403, USA

Agriculture, 2024, vol. 14, issue 4, 1-18

Abstract: Peanut ( Arachis hypogaea L.) plants respond to drought stress through changes in morpho-physiological and agronomic characteristics that breeders can use to improve the drought tolerance of this crop. Although agronomic traits, such as plant height, lateral growth, and yield, are easily measured, they may have low heritability due to environmental dependencies, including the soil type and rainfall distribution. Morpho-physiological characteristics, which may have high heritability, allow for optimal genetic gain. However, they are challenging to measure accurately at the field scale, hindering the confident selection of drought-tolerant genotypes. To this end, aerial imagery collected from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) may provide confident phenotyping of drought tolerance. We selected a subset of 28 accessions from the U.S. peanut mini-core germplasm collection for in-depth evaluation under well-watered (rainfed) and water-restricted conditions in 2018 and 2019. We measured morpho-physiological and agronomic characteristics manually and estimated them from aerially collected vegetation indices. The peanut genotype and water regime significantly ( p < 0.05) affected all the plant characteristics (RCC, SLA, yield, etc.). Manual and aerial measurements correlated with r values ranging from 0.02 to 0.94 ( p < 0.05), but aerially estimated traits had a higher broad sense heritability (H 2 ) than manual measurements. In particular, CO 2 assimilation, stomatal conductance, and transpiration rates were efficiently estimated (R 2 ranging from 0.76 to 0.86) from the vegetation indices, indicating that UAVs can be used to phenotype drought tolerance for genetic gains in peanut plants.

Keywords: mini-core; vegetation indices; color space indices; heritability (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q1 Q10 Q11 Q12 Q13 Q14 Q15 Q16 Q17 Q18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
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