A Field Phenotyping Platform at CIAT: Vision and Initiatives to Facilitate High Throughput Screening of Food and Feed Crops for Tolerance to Abiotic Stress Factors in the Tropics.

Agricultural ecosystems are under tremendous pressure to produce more food for ever increasing population with reduced footprints of agricultural technologies on the environments and increased resilience to global climate change. It is evident that the enhanced frequency and magnitude of abiotic stress such as soil water deficit and high temperatures will be the major constraints for food production while reduction in fertilizer use will be the major requirement for reducing the environmental footprints. Hence, in addition to improved management practice, genetic improvement of crop plants to enhance tolerance to abiotic stresses will be the key for facing the future challenges for food production. Recent advances in molecular biology and biotechnology tools have generated the opportunities to complement conventional crop improvement approaches through gene technologies and molecular markers. While the knowledge about genes is accumulating at an enormous pace, our limitation to understand the function of these genes is the bottle neck in converting scientific leads into robust molecular tools for selection of desired genotypes. Hence, high throughput plant phenotyping is one of the research priorities identified by the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) as part of its strategic directions for eco-efficient agriculture in the tropics.  CIAT has facilities to evaluate rice, common bean, cassava and tropical forage genotypes for tolerance to abiotic stress factors such as soil water deficit, waterlogging and low fertility acid soils.  A medium throughput screening techniques for root traits of common bean and tropical forages are being implemented to identify molecular markers associated with resistance to aluminum and drought under greenhouse conditions. The present review will focus on CIATs vision and initiatives to establish phenotyping platform to facilitate large scale screening for tolerance to abiotic stress in general and for soil water deficit in particular under field conditions. This will also cover recently designed automatic high throughput thermal imaging system to identify genotypes with cooler canopies under soil moisture stress environment, managed with a mobile rainout shelter, in the field .